When reselling servers, I've created sub-accounts in Orbit for the customer to directly contact ThePlanet if there are problems. However, in order to do this, they get full unrestricted access to our tickets. Potentially sensitive information could show up in there, so that could be a very big problem. Can it be set up like the hardware restriction where a sub-account can only see tickets assigned to them? Maybe I'm missing this option, though.

Could the sub-account place order !?!... And do they have accessing the specials !?!... :shock:

Seems like the point of reselling for them is to receive a discount on your own costs and in turn add value to the server by providing your own end-user support instead of hitting The Planet with it all.

The only real usefulness I see is to let subaccounts reboot or view statistics (bandwidth, etc.) on their own server(s).

Feel free to dispute my thinking. I'm open minded.

That's the way I am thinking too. I believe that Kevin and some of the other staffs did say that they only support direct customers and not customers of customers. It would be unfair for The Planet to provide a discount and do all the work and you just enjoy the profits from the discounts (no matter how small that may be). I may be wrong there though.

Set up a support ticketing system on your own site and then if there is something you cannot address yourself then submit the ticket in orbit on behalf of your customers.

But with that all said and done, with all the woo-haa about their Reseller's Program, I wouldn't be surprised that it would be something that would be extremely exciting for resellers or not.

In one case, I'm providing access to customer-only specials, which is the 1.7 Celeron boxes they still have. Since we are only acting as a passthru for them, it would be best if they can contact TP directly. In addition, if we ever happened to have a power outtage or natural disaster, we like to provide a method to sidestep us and go straight to the source without much hassle. Some of our customers are more technical than the rest and know what to do, they just may need physical hands-on work to get it done and don't want to wait on us to forward a request.

Root and eddy are correct. Orbit was designed to support our direct customers only.

But you did launch the reseller's offerts right now !?!...

Tim,

Maybe what could be done is to do a transfer of your client server to their very own account. I know it is going to cost $75 transfer fees but once done, your client would be a direct customer of Servermatrix and would be entitled to full and direct support.

However, I know the above method would mean that you will lose them as a customer but they will sell get to enjoy what benefit they can get from the server.

Yes, that is correct. We can understand why you and others may want this feature, however enabling this ability could pose a number of issues which is why we do not offer such unfortunately.

It's simple enough to do though. Just a bit of code:



How hard is it to filter the tickets listing depending on whether the user is a child account or not? I can assign tickets to my other orbit accounts (for whatever reason), so they should be only visible to them if they own them. It's as simple as a WHERE clause on a SQL call, so this shouldn't be something that takes more than 10 lines of code modification...

Some of us like to be able to see all tickets with our child accounts. It lets us have partners who work on the servers, and keep up with whats going on... without giving them billing control.

Orbit is not made for your customers, you're supposed to support them not orbit. Otherwise we would all resell servers and pass the techinical buck onto TP and all get rich, no?

I think what the guys is proposing is something similar to whats going on inside orbit anyway...

At the moment you designate which servers a user can and cannot see, and you can creat tickets for individual servers. Some sort of addon saying i only want this user to see *anything* related to this server and *nothing* else.

Personally I think your crazy for letting your customer's in orbit.

Yes I understand that, but there is really no need is there? I understand his point of view, but it his job to provide support thats the part of being a reseller. Any tickets that need orbit support he should then submit. Otherwise we could all resell and just give our clients orbit info.

My customers need access to Orbit to be able to check bandwidth usage (since it's only available that way). They also need a way to update root passwords in case they change. Orbit is somewhat adequate for this, but it is not ideal and does not adquately conceal that we're using ThePlanet.

whatever happened to "the rules have changed"?

hmmmmm

I guess the rules have changed

probably it was one of those ideas that sounded great at first, then they started realizing the issues involved.

The way I see this, he is not in the reseller plan but rather just renting the servers at SM prices and selling them on to his customers.

If that is the case, there is no discount so SM are providing the support for those servers anyway, no matter if it is to the owner of the account or a sub account. Saying that it is his customer doesn't really apply here.

I also agree (for different reasons) that there should be an option to disable all tickets from showing, because there could be sensitive info in a ticket that I don't want someone seeing, but I want them to be able to request reboots. If I disable the tickets, then I disable them from being able to reply to SM if the machine doesn't come back up after the reboot.

It does apply here obvisouly since that's the reason there not doing it. You think you should just collect your mark-up and not have to support them? Like gordon said, if this was the case we would all have site's reselling server's and making alot of money since we don't have to support our cutomer's.

Servermatrix give discounts to resellers because they are supporting the customers and they are doing the advertising to sell the product. SM take a hit on the cost so that they can offload this support. If this person is not getting the discount, then what is the problem with SM supporting them? The money they make is basically going to selling those servers, SM is getting full price for those servers, not a reduced price. What the OP makes over and above the cost price really doesn't come into it.

It is pretty simple to understand really and applies to physical purchases as well. You buy a camera from a shop and have a problem understanding a feature in it. You open the manual and the manufacturers helpline is there so you call it. You have been resold that product, however you can still go direct to the supplier for support.

It's totally different than that. Here's a different angle.

Your basically renting a house, then renting it out again. If you owned the house would you want your tenant's tenant calling you to fix a leaking water pipe? No they would call there landlord who in turn would call you.


I mean while where adding the option to allow my customer's to get support from here can we make it to where theplanet take's there payment also. Then at the end of the month they could just cut me a check.

IMO you have no buisness reselling unless you can offer a level of support theplanet can't.

That's probably the only way to make money at it anyway. You have to do more so you can charge more. If you're not holding your customers' hands, they won't have to hang around orbit long before they wonder what they are paying you for, bail out and go directly with TP.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I am, but some customers would like more direct control than that. They want to be able to issue reboots through orbit or file their own tickets. They still want us to manage the server, but they want the option of circumventing us if neccessary.

And still, the #1 reason is the bandwidth graphs. I can restrict a user to see just those for their server, but they still see all these other options which can be confusing ("I have 1 open ticket, but I can't view tickets?").

Some custom coding and u can pull the graphs from orbit into whatever UI you want your end customers to have. Even auto put reboot tickets into the Datacenter that client is in. Assuming you plan properly this is all possible. Given the discount/profit made from reselling you should want to be the first line on any issue. If you need to escalate it to the HOST DC you can make your system support that and post a proper ticket with your DC as well as update the client request saying it's been escalated.

(This was written late at night and in general terms since it applies to resellers in general and not just those hosted within TP)

Have you done this? I haven't looked into how Orbit handles session data and such.

it has been forbidden to do that. I think people ruined it by refreshing the data so often they were bogging orbit down, or maybe some other reason.

Well that's dumb. God knows I could just cache it and pull it on a 1 hour cron interval or something. But whatever...

Maybe if they just fixed the aforementioned problem with the simple bit of code required....

Yes, I'm sure you could and would, but I'm guessing that most people were too lazy and just pulled the graphs out of Orbit on demand.

But its not a problem, orbit is not for your customers. If they want the full control of reboot tickets etc they need to buy directly from the planet.

I only say this because; if every reseller gave their customers orbit accounts then all sorts of tickets would go through including simple ones like changing passwords etc which should be handled by the reseller, this affects ticket response times of the rest of us. Which at the moment is not great.

All of the above requested items would be the services that you should be supplying them. TP/SM has no obligation to directly support your customers. You and your affiliates/partners, if any, are the only ones who should be utilizing Orbit to submit tickets, reboot servers, maintain passwords and escalation plans, etc. ESPECIALLY if you're looking to conceal the fact that you're using TP (which seems kind of silly since any kid with access to traceroute/tracert or an IP lookup utility could figure that one out.)

As stated before, we cannot provide bandwidth stats indirectly; customers need direct access to do that. The same with root passwords: If they change them and don't notify ThePlanet, there could be a very hairy situation if TP needs to get into the box and cannot.

I'm fine without showing the ticket system, but I'd prefer that the ticket numbers be removed or that tickets shown be limited to tickets created by the user. I just think it's dumb that I can create sub-accounts but cannot limit access other than to an on/off state. Especially when this requires *very* little code to implement. It's just lazy of TP not to offer the option.

I would think it is the legal obligation issues here. Your clients are your clients and they are not The Planet's clients. The box is your responsibility if it is registered under your name. The Planet is not responsible for your clients and have no obligation to support them except through you. There is that proper chain of command. If your clients can bypass you to get direct support from The Planet then it would undermine your position as a reseller. Besides there is no way The Planet would know how you resold the servers to as opening up the bandwidth utilization charts might open up a whole new can of worms.

Why not just on a weekly basis, copy a snapshot of the charts and send it to your customer. Or set up RTG on the system to monitor the traffic flow, if done correctly, it should closely mirror the results in Orbit.

There are more than a few offerings that allow you to show bandwidth usage on a server across one or more IPs/NICs, both free and paid. As mentioned before by others, you could also send cached snapshots as well. This isn't really a strong point.


Again, this is something you should be maintaining. Your customers should be notifying you when a password changes and you should be updating Orbit. We as a company maintain our own secured/encrypted database of passwords and our customers notify us when a password is changed. We update our own database and Orbit as required. There has never been a problem with doing this. As a staff member already said, Orbit is currently geared for direct use only.


You're assuming facts not in evidence. Without knowing or seeing the actual code behind Orbit, what makes you think that that "very little code" will provide what you request or won't break something else? I'd rather not assume, but your suggestion is valid.

I myself would like to be able to limit tickets from certain departments from subaccounts (i.e. support personnel shouldn't need to see accounting or sales related tickets, etc.), but I can see how this could get complicated. Tickets get escalated and passed through multiple departments, so determining the scope of what is viewed and not viewed is a bit iffy. Should a ticket that at one point started out in Support but ended up in Accounting be viewed by a Support only sub-account? The list goes on and on.

All in all, Eddy's right. The legality of what you're trying to do is questionable. In the end, your customers should just buy their servers directly, since you're not exactly providing any kind of value added services (this is just what I'm gathering from your posts in this particular thread, so it's possible this is a misconception on my part.) But let's look at it this way. If you rent a Frigidaire refrigerator from XYZ Rentals on a monthly basis and said fridge needs servicing or needs to be replaced, would you go to XYZ Rentals (since you're renting it from them and the service contract states that the fridge was provided by them) or would you call Fridgidaire (who may have manufactured the fridge, but has no obligation to provide service to you directly)?

It's not a legal issue. That shouldn't impact this at all. It's all about visibility and security. If I were to outsource my support to another company and give them access to Orbit through a sub-account, they would not be clients of ThePlanet, but should still have access to the system.

Say I wanted them to only have access to a subset of webservers and not have access to a subset of company/business-related servers. I wouldn't want them seeing tickets in relation to the set of servers they cannot access. Furthermore, let's say one of them did something stupid and I want to discuss things with ThePlanet without them seeing. I can't do that with the current system. "The server was hosed by one of the techs with this support company I'm not going to be used any more" would be visible to anyone, including the company. Not good.



I appologize for implying knowledge of their backend system, but if they implemented in any decent sort of manner (which I'm sure they did), it should be relatively trivial. I know they're using MySQL on the backend (since I got a MySQL error on one of the pages the other dat ), and if they have even an entry-level DBA who wrote up the ticket database, it should be as simple as a condition in the WHERE clause to limit things to only tickets they can see. I'm not saying this is a 10 second job, but it's not as difficult as, say, writing your own domain registration system

I don't make statements for the Orbit developers, but I will state that calling anything "relatively trivial" without seeing the source code first is a bad assumption. In this case you have no knowledge of structure, the object model, the data model, or the security model (nor do I).



uhh. no. Orbit does not have a MySQL "backend". That is not to say that Orbit doesn't interface with Apps that use MySQL, but Orbit most certainly does not have an MySQL backend.

...

I'm just not making friends here... :shock:

I'm just saying, there are cases where I'd like my sub-accounts not to see tickets by my main account or from other sub-accounts. I would think that it would be reasonable to request this. Right?

I don't see why it's not reasonable to assume the work to create this would be much lower than that of, say, the RRP/EEP protocol systems for the new domain registration option. I'm not able to see tickets of other Orbit accounts, so there's conditional code to limit what tickets are shown already. It's a logical deduction of how the system works on some level. The tickets get filtered at some point, just improve the filtering options.

What is the reason you want your users to see their tickets? Are you saying that they should be able to open their own tickets or just see the tickets you have opened on their behalf?

No, he wants to shield his private tickets (accounting and such) from his customers. At the end of the day, his customers should not have orbit access AFAIK.

The vast majority of my tickets with ThePlanet involve some sort of remote hands service. Either reboots (for those servers without remote reboot) or hardware failure are the majority. The purpose of giving out access to customers is so they can issue remote hands requests to TP without having to wait on us. We're not looking to burden ThePlanet with dumb stuff like "how do I add a domain to my account in cPanel?". This is stuff we'll be passing on to them anyways, so there's nothing being added except a layer of communication.

I'm not looking to pass off our support entirely to ThePlanet; that's what we're selling to our customers on top of what TP provides (full support, software maintenance, security hardening, monitoring, etc). It's just those things that we can't do (since we do not have physical access) that I'd like and my customers would like direct access to. And, we need to do this in a way that's private and separate from other customers we sell to. That is all.

So, to summarize: customers want direct access to TP to do remote hands stuff, not to get free support, and they want to do this privately. And I think it's reasonable to ask for this.

Hmmm, we'll just have to disagree, I'm afraid. Orbit is there for customers of TP - your customers are not customers of TP. If your customers want access to remote hands stuff, it is up to you to provide a method for them to request it.

I know that at the end of the day, the request will be made with TP either way. I just have to assume that TP do not want people who are not their customers logging in to Orbit and opening tickets and stuff. More to the point, if you were to let your customers have access to Orbit, would they not wonder why they are getting the server through you and not getting it directly from TP (and save some moolah, I imagine).

Well, then I revert to my other reason for needing this:

Well you shouldnt be giving out orbit account logins so that solves that, right? Maybe you could just provide your customers with reboot console access?

Bottom line is that you are TP's customer, not your customers, not your server admin, you. If anyone else needs to do something via Orbit, they have to approach you and get you to do it. It really is as simple as that, even if you don't agree with that.

During the time when I outsourced server management of my server to Acunett, I don't give them any access to Orbit no matter how much I trust them. I do set up a sub account for my partner because he is sort of part of my organization.

If your own admin mess up, you work with them privately and if they mess up big time then fire them and remove their access. I mean if they did wrong and you are telling the truth and you need to communicate that to The Planet, I don't see any crime in that.

When you run a web hosting business, you need to be sure that you are able to provide a 24/7 support or at least be accessible during the time when your agreed operating hours. At which time you should monitor your email and now with modern technology, it makes live a lot easier with Wireless communication, cell phone with SMS alert which means you can route any reboot issues to your cell phone email account. You can get one of those PocketPC cellphone or PDA to get on Orbit and send the reboot request and answer your clients.