1st Reseller experience: very good , but...

[kalexan]

Hello to all!

We had to urgently move to a new server due to some problems with our old one, and we chose HostGator for:
- Support system (24h chat support, forum, ticketing system, and more)
- Generally low prices
- Distinctions and good references at forums around the world
- Servers' configuration
- Server abuse policies applied

During the move we had some issues as:
- We requested to have 19 accounts transfered (free service for resellers coming from other companies) but the service wasn't carried out after 26 hours of request. So, since we were in a hurry, we transfered them on our selves (generated full cpanel backups from old server and ftp them to new.
- During restore procedure we had several issues like some accounts restored where not visible by our whm, one was installed with no DNS zones on it (this domain was down for about 18 hours), some accounts were not restored at all (missed by technical support), and generally restore procedure took more than enough ticket exchange, that in my noble opinion some could have been avoided.

Other issues:
Some functions that could be (and should be) in CPanel , that are "Disk Space Usage" and "SSL Manager", are deactivated.
"Disk Space Usage" is a very good tool since someone can check why his/her customer has reached his/her maximum disk space usage at a glance (is it due to logs?Stats? Unpopped mails? Other?).
With "SSL Manager" deactivated, someone can not genarate CSRs and install SSLs by himself/herself for any of the domains, so he/she must contact HostGator for this (and get charged 10$ for the installation of course...)
Finally, every form that has to do with special requests (transfers, ip installations, CSR generation , SSL key installation, who knows what other) are not accessible but from direct urls (at least i couldn't find the links by the main web page, they must be "buried" inside knowledge base system.

Suggestions:
- Please provide at your web page a list with all available features at CPanel installations for every account type
- Please provide a centralized system for billed requests and a price list on every additional service in one place (so as pre-customers can have at a glance a clue of what services are paid and what are not)
- Provide the 2 mentioned functions at CPanel , so as resellers can take some more administrative actions themselves
- Change the logo at the billing software

The previous remarks-suggestions are just to point some issues out and are provided in a suggestive manner (except from the "SSL Manager" issue which is a complaint..), since we are really pleased with "the whole package".

[kalexan]

To all wannabe resellers out there consider the following:
HostGator's server abuse policy in reseller accounts may end up with a lot of frustrated customers of yours, at least this is what happened to me...

If one of your sites exceed, for whatever reason, HostGator's policy, then it will be down from an hour to several hours ! Support team suspends the site or some service at once, notify you with email, and if you are lucky enough to check this email after a few minutes (that means that you are at your office, or have 24/7 email checking capabilities...), then you will have to answer back with some sort of apologizes (?!?!) so as to unsuspend it, notifying them what have caused the server load. That's it! No warnings, no notifications from them in the first place!

Now, what was 25% for CPU usage for more than 90secs for me? Well it was a commercial shopping cart software backup procedure, on-the-fly xml creation from a product table, maybe 300 to 400 visits per day for a site...

I am sure it can also be forum maintenance procedures, batch processing procedures, DOS attacks etc

I use a reseller account to add my own websites, so I have full control over the code. But it seems that this is not enough...

So be careful when choosing a reseller program on what websites you will upload and what does 99.9% uptime guarantee means in the first place. Also, if a site of yours becomes popular, then it will be suspended for sure for a few hours, sometime. Finally, if you try to upgrade a site, or generally perform a not usual task on it, even if it succeeded at your testing server, guess what: Abuse police may be there!!!