Dan Ushman, SingleHop
In an email interview with the WHIR, Dan Ushman, co-founder and vice president of SingleHop talks about the company’s new Tandem reseller program.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider SingleHop (www.singlehop.com) recently launched its new Tandem reseller program (http://tandem.singlehop.com).
The new program gives resellers “complete scalability, control, and flexibility in their offerings” through SingleHop’s many partnerships and technologies, helping them to earn more money.
These capabilities include online, desktop, and mobile platform LEAP, server management platform Tandem Panel, and its live inventory feed, provisioning, and decommissioning.
Resellers of Tandem program also get free access to a range of services, including unlimited Globalsign SSL’s, R1Soft CDP agent, banner design, eFax service, advertising credits, Demowolf tutorials, and custom branded marketing materials.
In an email interview with the WHIR, Dan Ushman, co-founder and vice president of SingleHop, discusses the Tandem reseller program and its many benefits for resellers.
Why did SingleHop decide to revamp its existing reseller program?
Dan Ushman: SingleHop has offered accounts to resellers for years. Our program was basically the same thing that all our competitors offered – a system of tiered discounts which really was more like wholesaling servers than a partnership between two companies. Over time, we came to realize that a large portion of our business came from resellers, and we decided to give them more tools. First, we talked to them and we ran various concepts by them. After a concept was finalized, we worked closely with some of them to develop a better system. Our research led us to come to a realization: there is a paradox around reselling of dedicated servers. Basically, the further away the end user is from the actual provider, the less resources and control they have over their hosting.
In fact, in many cases, the reseller themselves lack many of the most fundamental tools of the business and are forced to essentially be middle men between their customers and their data center. Imagine how unintuitive that is — if an end-user needs help with something, they ask their provider (the reseller). Then, chances are, their provider will have to ask their data center to do something, then to let the end user know, the chain is in reverse. We thought ‘why not just give the reseller the tools they need to do it themselves?’ and based on that we came up withthe concept and the plan for developing Tandem.
How does this reseller program compare to SingleHop’s competitors and the rest of the industry?
DU: Great question, and yes, there are many differences. For one, most reseller programs do not offer the same level of automation and streamlining that Tandem does. Even if they do feature the automation, they certainly do not offer a branded experience for the end users. That’s always up to the reseller themselves, who often don’t have the resources to build themselves. Tandem is unique for a number of reasons, but the overall principal is to enable Tandem resellers get to leverage all of SingleHop’s resources. By that we mean our technology, which we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and years developing, our marketing expertise, our control panels, including efficiency and automation technologies, our partnerships and relationships and last but not least our buying power and economies of scale.
We also realized that there is no logical concept behind most of our competitors reseller programs; they look at them simply as extensions of their retail businesses, but they don’t seem to understand that resellers have different needs and those needs can be met in a way that, not only gives them control, but truly empowers them and their customers to push forward.
For example, if I sign up under a reseller under one of my competitors, chances are I won’t be able to reboot the server myself. Chances are I won’t be able to view bandwidth graphs myself, either, and I certainly won’t have one control panel from which to handle everything. I can be pretty sure that I won’t have a mobile control panel to reboot my servers from the road. Tandem providers all of these features to both the reseller and the reseller’s customers, and it does so in a way that preserves the reseller’s brand and enables him to excite the end user by providing an experience branded in the resellers colors, logo, image and general brand.
In Tandem, when a reseller signs up, they upload their logo, set their colors, configure their brand name and contact information. They also setup their own hostname to use for the control panel, so if they want to use SOMETHING.TOTALSERVERCONTROL.COM they can (that is our generic hostname), but if they want to use CONTROLPANEL.YOURCOMPANY.COM, they can also do that. The system will identify the branding settings by checking the URL it was accessed from and display their messaging, colors, brand from the sign on page throughout the panel.
This enables Tandem resellers to come out strong with their own control panel, branded in their image. The control panel works from any web browser and any smart phone. End users are empowered with many of the same features that SingleHop customers have, like remote reboot, live bandwidth information, rescue boot, server port control and more.
What benefits will customers gain through the Tandem reseller program?
DU: Aside from the above described technical benefits, resellers get access to SingleHop’s partnerships and relationships. SingleHop has partnerships with numerous vendors, including GlobalSign, cPanel, Netenberg, RV Skin, CP Skins, WHM Xtra, Parallels, eFax.com, Ksplice, TollFreeForwarding, DemoWolf, Bannaz and many, many more companies. We allow our resellers to benefit from these relationships both for themselves and to help them acquire more end users. For example, if they normally sell SSL certificates, they can now give them away. If they want to continue charging for them, they have just eliminated an expensive cost center for their business and turned a low-margin product into an all-margin product.
Tandem resellers get free banner ad designs from Bannaz.com, they get free eFax service for themselves for 6 months, and they get to give free eFax service to all of their customers, too. These, in combination with other offers like these, give our reseller’s some relationships they otherwise would not have with name-recognized vendors and industry leaders. One great example is Bannaz.com will provide every new Tandem reseller with a set of 5 banner ads in standard sizes. Each set will be customized and delivered to the reeller themselves, and then the reseller is free to use one of the advertising credit offers, for example our partnership with MySpace MyAds, to promote their business. Tandem resellers are free to then offer the same MyAds promotion to help them sign up more customers of their own.
Could you tell me more about the intelligent pricing system and discounts available for resellers?
DU: The intelligent pricing system is very simple actually. The idea is to separate things a bit. This is built on standard reseller pricing, which usually bases a discount on the number of servers in the account. Typically, discounts apply to new servers added. Tandem applies discounts retroactively to all servers under the account, so as a reseller grows with SingleHop, their existing servers become cheaper.
There are two ways we calculate discounts for resellers: Pricing option 1 – Intelligent Tiers This starts off as a standard reseller tier program. The difference here is that Tandem will separate discounts so that resellers can maximize their margins on add-on services and other higher margin products. We pass along some of our profit to our resellers this way, offering greater discounts on management and bandwidth than we would on software licenses (for example). The server discounts are comparable to what our competitors offer and in most cases more generous, but the real benefit is by enabling the resellers to realize more profit from add-on services — because that is where most of the profit is in this business.
Pricing option 2 – Overrides Overrides are service-level, meaning we give our resellers the option to purchase special products at fixed rates. These servers include stuff like Nehalem Xeon’s with 12 GB of RAM and 1 TB drives for $179/month (normal retail price is almost double that.) This also includes access to newer hardware before we offer it retail and special low prices on older hardware that we normally do not offer on our website. Overrides can also apply to services, for example, we can offer free cPanel to resellers and they can then either charge their customers for cPanel or give it away themselves.
Live feeds Resellers often base their products and services off the offerings on their data center’s website. The problem is that providers, including SingleHop, often change offerings, offer new services, new server models, new products and these changes happen rapidly. Tandem gives resellers’ access to a real-time inventory feeds. Resellers can then integrate these feeds into their websites so that they do not have to update offerings, they can just stream them from SingleHop.
What does SingleHop hope to achieve with this new reseller program?
DU: We obviously want to come out as a strong player in the reseller market; but more so we want to empower our resellers to really compete with the ‘big boys’. The marketplace is very lopsided, and unlike shared hosting, getting into dedicated hosting requires considerable resources. Thus, most companies opt to resell servers instead of operate their own, and because of the ‘reseller gap’ their customers have less access and less control. By enabling resellers to compete with big providers, we hope to stimulate the market, to create additional competition and to give our resellers a real competitive advantage. In the end, it translates to growth for both the reseller and SingleHop. Every reseller, like every SingleHop customer, has their own dedicated account executive. Having your own AE gives you a ‘friend on the inside’-someone who is as familiar with your needs as you are. It is this combination of automation technology and good-old elbow grease that truly sets SingleHop apart from its competitors.
