Selling Virtual Private Servers. A guide to positioning and selling VPS to your customers with Heart Internet

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1 Selling Virtual Private Servers A guide to positioning and selling VPS to your customers with Heart Internet

2 Contents Page Introduction 3 What are VPS? 3 Who are VPS customers? 6 VPS key selling points 8 VPS FAQs 12 2

3 Introduction Resell VPS hosting with Heart Internet and create your own virtual server specifications to sell to your customers. Create your own packages or offer a bespoke specification for each customer - the choice is yours. You decide on how much RAM your customers get, along with how many CPU cores and how much hard drive space they are allocated. You can also give them a choice between Linux and Windows platforms. Additionally all Reseller Pro customers get an exclusive 25% off the price of a virtual server. Create & sell custom VPS products 100% white label Resell VPS in real time Instant & free set up Powerful VPS API 25% off normal price Adding VPS to your product range provides your customers with the ability to choose the right solution for them. By offering shared hosting, virtual servers or dedicated servers, you significantly increase your potential customer base. 3

4 What are Virtual Private Servers? On a shared platform, server resources are shared between all sites on the server, and the performance of your site hinges upon every other site on that server being well-behaved. In a shared environment, server configuration and installed modules are essentially locked down some provision is made to allow for end-user configuration (PHP.ini modification for example), but essentially, you have to take what you re given. What a VPS offers you is a dedicated server environment that is located on shared hardware. You purchase a dedicated allocation of resources, and they are not shared with other users. To the end-user a Virtual server is functionally identical to a dedicated server. So essentially, a VPS offers you the same level of control as a dedicated server, but without the price-tag. However, that doesn t mean that VPS is an inferior product to a dedicated server, far from it. Depending upon the implementation, a virtual server can offer distinct advantages over its physical counterpart. A VPS can be a much more elastic product than a dedicated server a dedicated server has fixed hardware, and once a server reaches working capacity, your options are to migrate, add another server, or deal with downtime whilst an upgrade occurs. The resources assigned to a VPS can be scaled to meet usage requirements, as the underlying server hardware is typically extremely powerful. 4

5 The technical specifications Our VPS product is built upon the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualisation technology. We use the latest generation of Dell PowerEdge r9xx series servers, optimised for virtualisation, to provide a stable platform. RAM Disk space vcpu Operating system Create custom VPS Resell custom VPS Full root access Unlimited bandwidth 100 Mbit/s network RAID 10 SAS disks Out of band VNC/ SSH console KVM on RHEL Free IP address Plesk 10 cpanel 99.99% SLA Up to 32GB Up to 500GB Up to 12vCPUs CentOS 5 & 6, Ubuntu 11.10/ LTS, Windows Optional Optional Billing information You will automatically get 25% off every VPS you buy. The base specification for pricing (monthly direct debit) is 8.99 per month. This gives the customer 1vCPU, 1GB RAM and 50GB disk space. The cost of additional resources is as follows (your 25% discount has been applied to the prices below): Disk space: RAM: vcpu: 1.75 per 10GB 4.50 per 1GB 3 per vcpu 5

6 The VPS product is supported by these add-ons which you can sell to your customers: Plesk 10: Plesk 30: Plesk 100: cpanel: VPS back-ups: 3 per month (10 site license) 6 per month (30 site license) 8 per month (100 site license) 10 per month 1.75 per 10GB You can choose how much disk space to offer for VPS back-ups from between 10GB to 500GB. Again, this can be done on a customer by customer basis or you can create a set of pre-defined back-up products. Who are VPS customers? The scalable and flexible nature of a VPS means that it can meet the requirements of those on a budget just as easily as a large business, and everyone in between. Web designers Multi-site hosting Sand box Hosting clients websites Web developers Development platform Sand box Bespoke scripts & software Advanced Webmasters Large website(s) Dynamic functionality Multi-site hosting Bespoke scripts & software Database & server Businesses High resource website Ecommerce Media streaming Database & server Data storage 6

7 Multiple sites Advanced Ecommerce Multiple high resource sites Major online Ecommerce Service Usage Brochure site Simple Ecommerce High resource site Dynamic content Shared hosting Virtual Server Dedicated Server Web server Mail server Database server File server As the businesses of your customers grow, their (or your) need for control increases. Not only do you need to be able to allocate more resources to a project, concepts such as failover become extremely important. 7

8 VPS key selling points To reduce customer churn, we would recommend not pitching VPS as an advanced version of shared hosting. Shared hosting customers are typically not advanced enough to be able to manage a VPS and they are likely to find it too difficult. Managing a VPS requires the same technical competency expected of a dedicated server customer. Growth: Your VPS can grow with your business as you add more clients, or as your clients increase in size, your VPS can too. Flexibility: Your VPS is multi-purpose. It can be a webserver, fileserver, FTP server, mailserver, game server. Power: Our VPS is based upon advanced technology, and high powered Dell server hardware, optimised for virtualisation. Control: Users have full root access, can rebuild on command. They also have access to features not available on a dedicated server, like out-of-band console access, and a recovery build. Value: With the reseller discount and our low base price, we are one of the cheapest providers of a premium VPS product. This is because we build everything in-house, from the ground up. We don t pay for premade solutions. VPS provide the same level of flexibility as dedicated servers, but nowhere near the price. Data Security: The RAID10 setup on our servers ensures that we have a high level of redundancy, but remember redundancy is *NOT* a backup. We provide a very cheap backup solution, with options for both NFS mount and free snapshots. We have put together some VPS-focused sales copy for you to use as you see fit. You will find these resources in your RCC here: White label sales copy Marketing & pricing advice marketing templates 8

9 Setting up VPS How to set up VPS in your Reseller Control Centre Setting up a VPS is done in exactly the same way as all our other products with an additional customisation stage. If you simply want to buy one of our ready to go specifications, you can skip this stage. Once your order is complete, you can manage the VPS in the Manage VPS section of your RCC. Managing your customers Managing your customers VPS is easy with our custom made interface. Within Manage VPS, you can view and edit all your virtual servers information as well as modify their specifications and set up add-ons. Simply click on the VPS you want to manage and you will be taken to this screen 9

10 You can view a demo of the interface here: Your customer s control panel You can give your customers control of their VPS through our fully white label VPS control panel. The design of the control panel can be synchronised with your existing extend control panel branding and you pick and choose which features they have access to. 10

11 How to sell VPS through HostPay You can choose to sell set products or allow customers to create their own custom VPS directly from your website (or both) using HostPay. To sell VPS through HostPay, log in to your RCC and in HostPay, click on VPS Products. Tick the box next to I wish to sell VPS to activate the customisation options. You can now create your own VPS products to sell directly from your website. To allow your customers to customise the VPS themselves and then purchase it, click on Advanced VPS Products at the bottom of the page. Choose how much you want to charge for the extra resources they add and save those changes. It is as easy as that. 11

12 VPS FAQs What can I use my VPS for? Absolutely anything you like, provided it is legal. VPS are suitable to be used as webservers, games servers, FTP servers, mail servers, database servers. What is the benefit of having more virtual CPUs? Increasing your number of virtual CPUs will allow you to parallelise processes so that they may complete more rapidly. Each virtual CPU is assigned to a physical core on the VPS host machine. What is your SLA? Our SLA is 99.99% What type of hardware do you use? Each physical server has 10 x 10k SAS disks for primary storage, in a RAID-10 array, to provide full storage redundancy and high-speed access to data, and a top-end PERC RAID card with battery-backed cache to ensure the integrity of your data and no storage bottlenecks. We use flash memory for the boot volume, to ensure fast booting and to minimize downtime during upgrades. Each physical server has 32 Intel Xeon cores, designed for heavy server workloads, and 512GB of RAM to accommodate the present and future memory needs of each virtual server. How many IPs do I get? Each VPS comes with one free IP address. Additional IPs can be ordered for 2.25 a month. What if I want to change my OS? You can request a rebuild to an alternative OS from the VPS control panel, this will begin immediately. 12