I've given new providers a shot and it's been great- for the most part. The things I look for are:

- Low overheads. Unless they're backed by a lot of money they shouldn't really have any employees. It'll just add to their costs.
- Partnership. Being a co-owner, rather than full owner, of a hosting company means that I understand the huge benefit of having more than 1 owner.
- Registered company. If it isn't registered, it's probably a "kiddie host".
- If they resell, they'd better be doing so from a top quality provider.
- A "good" price. Hard to define but not too cheap and not too expensive (otherwise I and others might as well purchase from a more reputable company). When I started holderhost, I sold some shared hosting for $6-$8 / year. It's bad business. A host needs to charge a reasonable amount in order to be able to invest in improving it's product.
- A responsible owner who isn't known for starting and then just closing projects.

Love the documentation. We recently became a directadmin partner and get access to their internal pricing. I installed the DA control panel for a client the other day and ran into some issues. Checked through their documentation and found the solution, Easy as. DirectAdmin is also reasonably lightweight as well as feature rich.

WHMCS is fantastic because it's so feature rich and customers understand how it works because it's so widely used. However there is something to be said for SaaS billing platforms like BillingServ which are able to role out automatic updates and can have fantastic uptime.

Your server hostname could really be anything but the "server" part is the hostname and the server.hosts.com is the fully qualified domain name. You should be able to change your hostname in your Solus/ other control panel.

It's a real pity that development has frozen. Their last release was 2013-06-11. BoxBilling could have been a fantastic alternative to WHMCS for smaller webhosts.

Just a suggestion to have a review template and some guidelines about conducting reviews. (for example, creating a review thread after a few days with a webhost isn't really a review).

The black friday/ cyber monday deals are generally pretty good. What you want to do is look out for spectacular deals from very reputable hosts. They will be forced to support the low pricing that they've offered whereas other hosts might just cut and run.

Congratulations to [USER=157]@newBB[/USER] - contacting you now so we can set you up ASAP.

Good luck guys!

Quote from: "Jordan Smith, post: 1206, member: 108"Congrats [USER=5]@Sam[/USER] welcome to BillingServ!

Thank you very much. I think I know what I am going to use the license for. I'll have to do setup manually for the product for now but it actually isn't too much hassle. Will reveal it to the community once things have been setup!

Thank you very much [USER=108]@Jordan Smith[/USER] and [USER=1]@Allan[/USER] Really looking forward to testing out BillingServ and seeing if I can put it to production use.

Excellent! Best of luck Jordan. I know a number of hosts are dissatisfied with WHMCS. It especially annoyed me when they went through those security issues and they kept pushing updates every couple of days.

What I am meaning is: http://docs.blesta.com/display/user/Universal+Module. I really like the look of your project and might consider it for something new I want to set up.

Any plans for SolusVM integration?

Has your main hosting website ever been ddoss'd or hacked? Just saw the post below on LET. What do you do to protect yourself from such an eventuality?

We have a few methods/tools for reducing the majority of spammer signups and their ability to mass mail. However that still doesn't stop everybody, unfortunately, and one of our IPs was listed on multiple blacklists. The larger blacklists appear to be much more reasonable and will remove an IP once the offender has been suspended and removed. However, some of the smaller ones are just plain annoying.

apews.org doesn't appear to offer any removal tool at all.

What do you do about spammers? What is the best process to "clean" IPs?