Maybe one day. There is certainly profit to be had in the hosting business
as long as you can make the big investments that pay off in the long term.
TuCows certainly could.
I didn't consider the competing with customers part, though.
It could be a welcome relief from the headaches associated with maintaining
your own servers or being in a shaky reseller situation. Nothing is worse
that using a provider that is growing faster than their capabilities or with
whom a reseller channel is simply an afterthought.
-Tim
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Gordon Hudson" <gordon@hostroute.net>
To: "Timothy Tate" <tdtate45@hotmail.com>,<discuss-list@opensrs.org>
Subject: Re: Will TuCows ever offer reseller webhosting?
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 12:44:49 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
I know how you feel.
Before we had our own servers we were resellers for two companies.
The one who we got windows hosting from decided to sell up and we were left
stranded.
I also had problems with a resold DNS service (not Tucows).
This puts me off using any service hosted on another providers servers where
we don't have control.
However, I think Tucows would work because I know they would throw money at
it to make it work rather than have it collapse in embarassment.
I am looking at the blogware product this weekend with a view to offering it
shortly.
>I'm just wondering what is keeping TuCows out of this market.
It would mean they were competing directly with their resellers, most of
whom are web hosting companies or ISP's.
Developing stable control panel with enough features to satisfy end users
is a huge task.
Buying into something like Plesk or Cpanel is possible but may not be
scaleable.
This is one of the most difficult parts of web hosting.
We use Cpanel but with many of the "advanced" (read that as "troublesome")
features turned off and a centralised DNS system. As its supplied out of the
box it is not scaleable to large service providers.
It also does not support clustering well enough.
This is where most control panels fall down - scaleability.
the modifications we have done (within the licence) make it work for us.
We serve about 24,000 sites off cpanel servers now.
Another issue is abuse.
Tucows would need alarge abuse department to deal with spammers and other
issues.
This would be another overhead to be factored in.
Plus, the price of reseller hosting has dropped through the floor.
We had someone leave us to go to 5GB with unlimited domains for $5 a month.
(Yes, I know its probably a poor service, but marketing wise people do look
for low price points, we handle that by habing a low entry price point but
only for hosting of 5 domains so we limit what we are willing to provide at
that price).
There would be very slim profits for Tucows in that type of market.
I must remember not to drink so much coffee on a Saturday morning!
Regards
Gordon Hudson
Hostroute.com Ltd
www.hostroute.net
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