I was trying to post this is general section, not feature request

Hey guys, I'm interested in hearing about your experiences with shared hosting. Currently, I"m a a linode 360 that's hosting 5 low volume ecommerce sites for friends. I"m going to be adding a social networking site and other bigger projects in the near future that I think will require much more resources.

Would anyone advise against/for migrating all the low volume ecommerce sites a shared hosting(reseller) account. I think upgrading my linode plan to 540 or 720 would be a good move, but i'm interested in knowing what's your opinion on having a shared reseller account to handle all of my minor, low volume sites.

Thanks

I currently moved from a reseller acc to linode... the reseller has problems with php and slow down / locked / rebooted almost every day...
If the sites are low volume, they won't degrade the performance of a high volume site. If you need more power, buy another 360 and put Mysql there and leave apache alone in the other linode...
I think you can have much more flexibility and power with linode, i'll never go back.

Thanks for your reply nihues. I've definitely heard/read a ton about bad experiences on shared hosting. I guess I'm fortunate to not have experienced it.

The only positive is that I see they have more disc space and they come with a cpanel license. For whatever reason, the few customers and prospects I do have aren't warming up to Virtualmin, although I only have the GPL version of virtualmin. And they want tons of unlimted features they'll never use.

From an administration perspective, it's a no brainer. I think my issue may be more of business marketing problem, not a technical issue. With those accounts, they throw around words like "unlimited" when describing their features(disc space, bandwidth, databases, email accounts, etc..)

I guess I was thinking I could create more attractive packages to the lower volume website owners, while having less server maintenance.

Anywho, thanks for your input, it has helped out alot.

Just my humble suggestions...

Aim to build your business on value-added services, not solely your marketing strategies.

"Unlimited" anything is a marketing strategy. You can't compete with Hostgator, etc. in that arena.

But you can compete by being a better webhost.

Find out what you client really needs, then hold their hand, help them achieve it, and charge 'em reasonably for it.

If Webmin/Virtualmin is a stumbling block for clients, invest in a cPanel license.

If they insist on an "unlimited" everything plan for little money, then recommend them to your favourite shared hosting provider(s) and wish them well. Chances are, they'll be back

Reliability, security: Linode

Cost, ease of setup: Shared/cloud hosting (eg reseller account)

With Linode, setting up the server takes more time and is more of a pain - you also are responsible for your own backups and security patches. There's a lot to be said for going with someone like Hostgator where everything's done for you. But with Xen you win with security and reliability. Others on the same server can't mess up your performance and you don't get the security issues. You also don't get your host changing something on the server without telling you and screwing something up (my personal experience on some other shared reseller account).

Linode, since with a reseller they can pretty much kill you account anytime they want for any arbitrary reason they want.

If this is true, it's only because of the luck you have picking a host (and Linode appears to be a very good one). There's no reason that there would be any difference in general between a VPS and a reseller account, except for if you happen to host with a really bad reseller host and you compare that with Linode.

Both types of hosting have good and bad providers, and just like everyone else, Linode has terms of service and would reserve the final say in what is and isn't allowed.

I'll spare you the "if you got kicked off, it's your fault for doing something dodgy" line, because for all I know you just happened on a really bad host and really did kicked off for no good reason. That's not representative of all hosts though.

I moved here from a reseller account with Hostgator, after the initial flurry of learning I was pleased.

I had a reseller account because my wife's website was getting a lot of traffic from Stumble and the original shared account couldn't cope, at first the reseller account performed well but that soon tapered off too.

On a Linode 1024 now and performance is significantly better, granted only getting 5-6k uniques per day now.

I also support a hobby site that is a shered host, have created a mirror of it on a Lindode 768 and load tests are very promising, Linode continues to serve well whilst the shared version nosedives when I put a load on.

Overselling no doubt!