My name is Travis and I run a small web design firm that has around 10 hosting clients and I’m looking to grow and offer my own hosting service. I DO NOT want the cheapest options. Quality over Cost.
I am looking for someone who offers good hosting (VPN, etc) & domain registration, SSL, email service etc. I like the idea of having Domains & Hosting with the same company. I know Rackspace & MediaTemple are too really great options for hosting but not DN’s, SSL, etc. Maybe NameCheap.com? Just weighing my options… Thanks!
Another option that you should consider: co-operate with a good hosting vendor and direct your web design customers to that, when they need. Offering a good hosting service will require you spend most of your time on net. You will need to answer your customers’ requests asap, day and night. It’s much different than offering web design service. Why don’t you focus on web design service, your strength?
I have some friends doing that way, and even more: they don’t offer graphic design. Just do coding. Customers can get graphic done some where else. At first, it looks they are losing customers. In fact, they focus on what they know perfectly, the niche, and they are always busy enough with customers.
If you are web designer, you’d better focus on what you do best. Do not get yourself into web hosting. At the end of the day you will realize that you are loosing a lot of time on providing hosting support to your customers. So you’d better go and find a managed solution which would include support to end-customers.
You definitely want a VPS in your case since you already have 10 clients and it looks like you are growing steadily.
For perspective and something to judge off of, I have a Linux VPS and I got a free domain with it. No downtime in my experience and I easily housed 15 blogs that got a lot of traffic.
Various hosting providers will offer you whitelabel support with a reseller account and eNom reseller account.
This way you can provide hosting and domain name registration to you customers without much hassle and all the support being handled directly by your hosts.
I don’t have anyone in particular to recommend, just thought I’d give you some pointers of what to look for.
Two suggestions depending on how much you care to directly work with your customer accounts:
Join an affiliate program with a hosting company and direct all your clients there.
Purchase a reseller hosting plan which will give you the ease-of-use and direct access to your client’s accounts. This has always been my choice as a web designer instead of having to collect login details from a client when changes need to be made.
As far as what you mentioned, I would definitely give a thumbs up for Namecheap. Although their support staff are often short with me, I’ve still found the prices, speed of setup, and API system great! (The API will be absolutely essential if you end up using a billing system like WHMCS.)