I have been a reseller for about 2 years now. I have only hosted friends and family during that time. I am now going public, are there any tips n tricks that the older companys can give out that can help a new public company? Anything would be great.

Two good things that will help are keeping the servers reliable (which if you are a reseller then pick one that manages their servers well), and customer service. When you start hosting people, businesses etc... you can get clients from anywhere in the world and therefore, 8pm at night for you could be business hours for them. So be prepared to get support, sales, billing enquireys at any time of the day.

If you can provide a good service then you are on to a winner!

Also keep your records up todate of customers and your billing and taxing. It only requires a little bit of time a day, but if you leave it till the end of the year then you have a lot of work to do to tidy things up.

There are other things... but I will let others chime in

Thanks for your input, I was a reseller and I have now upgraded to a VPS that allows more control over things. I like having the control over the VPS to make changes as I see fit. But on the downside of that, I must maintain all security updates which does not problem me at all, since I am great with *nix environments anyway.

Thats a good start! With a VPS you get more control and havnig the knowledge to manage the updates is a great bonus! It saves money because you dont have to pay someone else to secure it.

Very true, the only problem that lies with VPS, when another users account eats to much of a system resouce, you go down too. I found this out in the first few days when I purchased the account. Apparently an account was using all of the share memory pages, which in turn took from all the other accounts as well. Since all accounts that are on the "HOST" server are burstable to 1 GB of memory. But I have been told, the other user has been moved to an empty server so my problem will not happen again. Now thats good customer service.

Doesnt a VPS prevent other VPS users on the server from eating your resources? I thought you had so much "guaranteed" and then any left over "burst" is a bonus. I havent used VPS's before appart from a Nix one I recently got which is quiet at the moment with no problems.

A VPS does guarantee your resource, however in the event that another is bursting to high levels regularly, then they're still going to impact everyone else.

Generally (from the ads I've seen), a lot of VPS's are quite low on actual server resource anyway, so are quite likely to burst greater than their default values in normal running.

Thanks for that info Alex. It's interesting to know!

I think you're referring to linux VPS, not windows.

Yes. All posts were referring to an OS of Linux. It has been mentioned in other posts that Windows doesn't utilize burstable RAM for their VPS's.

In theory VPS's should isolate all users so that one will not affect the others in any way. Nothing is perfect though, so it's possible that one VPS will slow the host enough to have an affect on other users. It is considerably less likely for this to happen on a VPS though, when compared to a shared hosting account.