Shared hosting, Reseller account or rented server?
In about 3-4 days I will be putting my new offer to sale. The product is ready, the marketin is ready, only one problem is left - hosting.
The product is a CMS with graphic management system (colors, images etc.) that is targeted for small companies and people who want to start a website fast.
I want to make the purchase & installation 100% automatic. The process will consist of:
- CMS Installation
- Subdomain configuration
- Onlywire submission
- Search engine submission
After each purchase is made and paid these 4 steps will be initated on auto-pilot.
The only problem is that I don't know what kind of hosting would be optimal for me because:
- If I go with buying a new account for each customer I have to make installation by hand or make pre-installations for all the customers and then when someone makes a purchase he will get the data of one of the available installations. This has 2 disadvantages - one, there is work to do by hand. Second, when I will do pre-installations the hosting accounts will be valid for less then 12 months.
Also - buying hosting accounts is the only solution I know. I have been working as a designer for about 2 years and I have never used dedicated servers or reseller accounts. But this time the solution I know seems to be stupid.
So my question is:
- If I get a reseller account from one of the hosting companies how does it work? Does the customer buy hosting from me or from the company. Can I setup new accounts on auto-pilot. Can I have a script to pre-install certain files on every new accout ?
- If I get a dedicated server is it hard to configure it and setup limitations for every account. I know little about linux - I work on Windows on have only used WAMP for all of my design / CMS work.
My goals are to:
- Provide quality hosting for all of my customers
- As the CMS is not demanding I do not need 1 GB space - evern 100 MB will be enough - I want it to be cheap
- Have the possibility to auto-install scripts on each new account
- Protect myself from 1 person using all of the bandwitch if it will be a shared account (for example sharing warez on his site or giant movies).
- Make it easy to manage all the accounts
- (OPTIONAL) When I release an update make it possible to update certain files on all of my customers accounts
Any help will be apprecieated.
Best regards
Michael
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