技术转售前_向客户转售虚拟主机

技术转售前

With the rise in inexpensive virtual private server (VPS) packages, the web is full of hosting companies making web designers and developers the enticing sounding offer of “becoming their own web host”. This is one of those things that sounds a really great idea until you start to unpack it. After all, who wouldn’t want to make some nice monthly income by hosting sites for their clients? Isn’t this just money for nothing? I’ve responded to this on a couple of forums recently and thought it would make a useful post here.

随着廉价虚拟专用服务器（ VPS ）软件包的兴起，网络上到处都是托管公司，这使得Web设计师和开发人员成为“成为自己的Web主机”的诱人提议。 这是听起来很不错的主意之一，直到您将其拆开包装为止。 毕竟，谁不想为客户托管网站来赚取可观的月收入？ 这不就是一分钱一分货吗？ 我最近在几个论坛上对此做出了回应，并认为它会在这里发表有用的文章。

At edgeofmyseat.com we have always avoided hosting for our clients, the following reasons are why I generally believe reselling hosting to be a bad idea for small agencies.

在edgeofmyseat.com上，我们始终避免为客户托管服务，以下原因是我通常认为转售托管服务对小型代理商不利的一个原因。

支持托管客户 (Supporting hosted clients)

Supporting clients who see you as their host can use up a lot of time. Will the money you make from reselling cover the additional hours of support and assistance?

将您视为主机的支持客户可能会花费大量时间。 您从转售中赚到的钱会支付额外的支持和协助时间吗？

If you are taking money for a service – providing hosting – even as part of a package of services you offer to your clients, then you take on the responsibility of ensuring that service is up and running, and solving any problems that the client has. As a reseller though you have no control over how reliable the service you resell is. If it is frequently down the compensation you will get from the host will be little to none – and yet you will be spending your time responding to upset clients with nothing you can actually do to help other than put in a support request yourself. As your clients will expect their sites to be up 24/7 you need to be happy to deal with these support requests at any time of day or night.

如果您是在花钱购买服务（提供托管服务），甚至将其作为提供给客户的服务包的一部分，则您有责任确保该服务已启动并正在运行，并解决客户遇到的任何问题。 作为转售商，尽管您无法控制转售服务的可靠性。 如果经常发生这种情况，您从主持人那里得到的报酬几乎是零—但您将花费时间响应沮丧的客户，而除了自己提出支持请求外，您实际上无能为力。 由于您的客户希望他们的网站全天候24/7开通，因此您需要在白天或晚上的任何时间高兴地处理这些支持请求。

By taking on hosting you potentially end up becoming the go to person for all kinds of issues unrelated to the website. If you are a Mac user will you be able to help out a client who is having trouble with Outlook on their PC? If you provide the hosting and it includes email, you will be their first port of call when they can’t get their settings right.

通过托管，您可能最终成为与网站无关的各种问题的专家。 如果您是Mac用户，是否可以为在PC上使用Outlook遇到麻烦的客户端提供帮助？ 如果您提供托管服务，并且其中包含电子邮件，则当他们无法正确设置设置时，您将成为他们的第一通电话。

追逐小发票 (Chasing small invoices)

For many projects, especially those where the client has some kind of Content Management System to do their own updates, the designer will deploy the site and then not need to do further work on this site for some months. If you are billing these clients monthly, you will be bound to have some who delay paying for as long as possible or will only pay when chased. The cost to your business of chasing small invoices can be huge.

对于许多项目，尤其是那些客户具有某种内容管理系统来进行自己的更新的项目，设计人员将部署该站点，然后在几个月内无需对该站点进行进一步的工作。 如果您要按月向这些客户收费，那么您一定会拖延尽可能长的付款时间，或者只有在追逐时才付款。 追逐小额发票对您的企业造成巨大的损失。

更新和保护服务器 (Updating and securing servers)

Unless you are confident that you can solve most issues yourself with your server, or have truly excellent support from your host, then reselling hosting may cause more trouble than it is worth to you financially.

除非您有信心可以自己解决服务器上的大多数问题，或者得到主机的真正出色支持，否则转售主机可能会带来更多的麻烦，而这在财务上是不值得的。

If you are not a systems administrator then it is likely you will have taken on a dedicated or virtual private server with some management software installed – something like Web Host Manager. Your host will provide the server with WHM installed and then you use WHM to generate sites including email and other features as needed. This all works really well, except that with many hosts you will be expected to do updates and apply security patches yourself. If you run into any problems then – once again – you will need to put in a support request to your host and wait, while pacifying annoyed clients.

如果您不是系统管理员，则很可能您已使用安装了某些管理软件（例如Web Host Manager）的专用或虚拟专用服务器。 您的主机将为服务器提供安装了WHM的服务器，然后您可以使用WHM生成站点，包括所需的电子邮件和其他功能。 这一切都非常有效，除了在许多主机上，您需要自己进行更新并应用安全补丁。 如果您遇到任何问题，那么-再一次-您需要向主机提出支持请求并等待，同时安抚烦恼的客户。

服务和保险条款 (Terms of Service and Insurance)

If you are reselling hosting you should take advice on the terms of service you offer to your clients and whether your business insurance will cover any claims arising from a client believing they have lost money due to the hosting you provide being unavailable. This is going to be different depending on where you and your clients live, however if you do or are considering becoming a reseller I strongly advise you check this out to make sure you are covered.

如果您要转售托管服务，则应就您提供给客户的服务条款以及您的商业保险是否涵盖由于客户认为由于您提供的托管服务导致客户损失了钱而引起的任何索赔，向您咨询。 根据您和您的客户的居住地，情况会有所不同，但是，如果您已经或正在考虑成为转销商，我强烈建议您查看此内容以确保受到保障。

If you intend to “switch off” non-paying clients this should also be detailed in the terms and conditions that they agree to. You should ensure that in taking that action against a client they have no way to come back with a claim that you have damaged their business.

如果您打算“关闭”非付费客户，则应在他们同意的条款和条件中对此进行详细说明。 您应确保在对客户采取该行动时，他们没有办法声称您损害了他们的业务。

It is also worth having a policy in place in terms of what happens if the client wants to continue with you as a designer but move to new hosting, or stop using your design services but keep the hosting. Would you be happy giving access to a site on your server to another designer, for example?

如果客户希望继续与您一起担任设计师但转而使用新的托管服务，或者停止使用您的设计服务而保留托管服务，那么在发生情况方面也应该有一个适当的政策。 例如，您是否愿意将对服务器上站点的访问权授予其他设计师？

您能做什么呢？ (What can you do instead?)

If you are pitching for jobs where part of the requirement is hosting, this doesn’t mean you should feel you have to offer hosting yourself. When I put in proposals that require hosting, I detail the costs for the hosting at a preferred supplier of ours (we like to use Memset). I will spec out the type of server, and the monthly or annual costs, and include this in the proposal. As we tend to put clients onto Virtual Dedicated servers I will also indicate the extra options that the client may or may not decide to have – such as firewalls, fully managed support and so on. The client then can make the decision about what they feel they need. They can also decide to go with an equivalent host of their choice – as long as it meets the minimum requirements for the application we are developing. This puts responsibility for that decision in the hands of the client – and although most will go with our recommendations they get the chance to check out the host themselves.

如果您要寻找一部分需要托管的工作，这并不意味着您应该觉得自己必须提供托管。 当我提出需要托管的提案时，我会详细说明在我们首选的供应商（我们喜欢使用Memset ）上托管的费用。 我将说明服务器的类型以及每月或每年的费用，并将其包括在建议中。 当我们倾向于将客户端放置在虚拟专用服务器上时，我还将说明客户端可能会或可能不会决定拥有的其他选项，例如防火墙，完全托管的支持等。 然后，客户可以根据自己的需求做出决定。 他们还可以决定选择相同的主机，只要它满足我们正在开发的应用程序的最低要求即可。 这使该决定负有客户的责任-尽管大多数人都会接受我们的建议，但他们有机会亲自检查房东。

We are always happy to become technical contact for the account on behalf of the client, so they don’t need to deal with setting up a VPS or getting their site configured or even liaising with the hosting technical support if the box is fully managed. Once the site is up and running if the client sees that the server is down they can directly contact the hosting company, and utilize the 24/7 support there, rather than having to wait to get hold of us during office hours.

我们总是很乐意代表客户成为该帐户的技术联系人，因此，如果对机箱进行了完全管理，则他们无需处理VPS或配置其站点，甚至无需与托管技术支持联系。 一旦站点启动并运行（如果客户发现服务器已关闭），他们可以直接与托管公司联系，并在那里使用24/7支持，而不必等待上班时间来与我们联系。

If you like the idea of getting something for hosting, some hosts have a referral scheme that will enable you to make money from hosting without ever having to operate as a host yourself. It goes without saying that you should only recommend a company you are happy with, but if you find a great company and they are willing to offer you credit against your own hosting or cash for accounts you put their way – then everyone wins.

如果您希望获得用于托管的东西的想法，则某些主机具有推荐方案，可使您从托管中赚钱，而不必自己充当主机。 不用说，您只应该推荐一家您满意的公司，但是，如果您找到一家出色的公司，并且他们愿意为您自己的托管提供现金或以您自己的方式提供现金，则每个人都会赢。

如何允许客户预览网站？ (What about allowing clients to preview sites?)

When I have discussed this issue in the past, one argument for hosting client work yourself is that you can allow them to preview the site, but as they don’t have access to the server they can’t take it and not pay the final invoice. Disregarding whether you should be working for such scoundrels, if you do have these concerns – or just want to be able to demo work before moving it over (for example they have an existing site in place) then taking out a staging server of your own is a sensible step.

过去我讨论此问题时，自己托管客户端工作的一个论据是您可以允许他们预览网站，但是由于他们无权访问服务器，因此他们无法使用该服务器并且不支付最终费用。发票。 如果您确实有这些顾虑，则不管您是否应该为这样的坏蛋工作，还是只想能够在移交工作之前进行演示工作（例如，他们已经有一个现成的站点），然后取出自己的临时服务器是明智的一步。

We use a Miniserver box at Memset as a staging environment, so we set up a subdomain for a project on that server and allow it to be tested there. As this server matches the environment most of our projects are hosted on it is a good way for the client to test. Quite often they populate all their content into the CMS on staging and we just migrate the entire database and folders of assets over to their server once they are ready to go live.

我们在Memset处使用Miniserver框作为暂存环境，因此我们在该服务器上为项目设置了一个子域，并允许在该子域中对其进行测试。 由于此服务器与环境匹配，因此我们托管了大多数项目，这是客户端进行测试的好方法。 他们经常会在登台时将所有内容填充到CMS中 ，一旦准备好上线，我们就将整个数据库和资产文件夹迁移到其服务器上。

Personally I like transparency in dealing with other services used by our clients. I feel that it saves us from ending up in potentially messy situations where we are seen as providing a service that then fails for reasons outside our control. Would love to know other experiences of reselling – perhaps it works really well for you? Let me know in the comments.

就个人而言，我喜欢与客户使用的其他服务打交道时保持透明。 我认为这使我们免于陷入潜在混乱的局面，在这种情况下，我们被视为提供的服务由于某些无法控制的原因而失败了。 是否想了解其他转售经验-也许对您来说真的很好？ 在评论中让我知道。

翻译自: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2011/02/02/reselling-web-hosting-to-clients/

技术转售前