October 22, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- While this week's Web hosting industry news was certainly varied, it was also, more than most weeks, dominated by one trend in particular, as news from every corner of the hosting industry, and some spots beyond its edges, dealt with the many aspects of the reseller hosting model.
On Monday, domain registrar and Web hosting provider RegisterGator.com announced that it had launched a domain registration and hosting reseller program called The-Domain-Reseller.Com. The new service, says the company, reduces the provisioning time for domain registration and reseller hosting to a few minutes, and allows resellers to offer domains along with hosting, spam-protected email accounts, Web site builders, security, online file storage and credit card processing.
On Tuesday, hosting automation software developer SWsoft announced that Web hosting provider The Planet Internet Services had launched a new dedicated server offering, powered by SWsoft's which will allow the company's partners to resell virtual private servers. The Planet says the Virtuozzo software will provide its resellers with a new revenue stream, while also improving service levels and hardware utilization.
On Thursday, UK-based hosting company Fasthosts announced that it had launched a new promotion to provide three free months of reseller Web hosting. The company said IT service providers in the UK could test drive its reseller accounts, hosting unlimited Web sites, hosting unlimited email and online collaboration tools and providing uncapped broadband Internet access. The company says it expects the deal to appeal to Web designers and Web developers, as well as business customers who need to manage multiple Web sites.
Also on Thursday, Web hosting provider M6.Net announced that it had introduced six new reseller hosting packages, with four of them designed to be used by either resellers or individual customers. The company said it limits the number of domains a reseller can host, in an effort to discourage overselling. M6.Net said its Dev kit and SQL kit plans cater to people who are just starting out in the Web hosting business, while its Pro kit and Power kit cater to more serious Web hosting businesses and corporate development.
And again on Thursday, private-label Web hosting provider Hostopia announced that it had begun a program to encourage reseller hosting providers to move their customers onto Hostopia's managed service by offering them up to $2,500 for a Sun Cobalt RaQ server appliance or other similar equipment. Hostopia says the financial incentive is designed to ease the cash impact of moving customers from outdated platforms onto Hostopia's servers.
This week also saw a feature article describing how a company, Jamcracker, was using reseller partnerships with several hosting companies to distribute its tools for software developers that want to offer their tools as services. The company said this week that it had partnered with Web hosts NaviSite and ServePath to deliver its Pivot Path On Demand Delivery Platform and On Demand Enablement Kit, along with dedicated hosting, network connectivity and managed services, to software vendors transitioning to ASP delivery models.
Of course, there were other issues at play in this week's news, but the cross-section of varied reseller-related announcements offered a remarkably broad perspective on how widespread, and important to the business of hosting, the reseller relationship has become.
