Common administration for several independent client VPS's
We would like to be able to install and support multiple Linode VPS's for multiple independent customers yet maintain the ability to do technical management of each client's container. We would like to do this while giving each customer ownership of their VPS. What we would like is the same arrangement that we get at Network Solutions where we are listed as technical contact for our customer's domains and so can manage all of them, while each customer owns their domain and could fire us if they wanted.
The advantage of such an arrangement is that we can take care of technical details that would be too much for most customers, while they maintain ownership of their domain (or Linode VPS). And of course the various customers are blocked from making changes to other customers' sites.
Is this now possible? If not, is it planned?
10 Replies
This is supported now by asking your customer to create a user for you under their account. They can even give you access to the Linodes themselves without revealing their billing information via the Account-->Users and Permissions tab.
The part that isn't supported: You need an individual user for each account so you would need to manage several log in credentials. I'd suggest keying off their company name -- dharmaCompanyA, dharmaCompanyB, and so on.
Hope that helps,
-Tom
> Each client can create their own VPS and give you a user account in the Linode manager that will give you whatever level of access is necessary.
The Network Solutions setup is much more convenient. When we log in there it gives us a list of clients that we manage and we can get to each client's configuration with one click, without logging in differently.
Would your suggestion let us create the customer's VPS by cloning a template VPS owned by our account? That's what we do now on our own server running OpenVZ containers. In our current setup this is easy because we log in to the "hardware node" which owns all the containers and we run a script in that environment to create and configure a new VPS.
If you don't have such a function yet, you might seriously consider adding it. This kind of facility is a big help in managing a collection of client VPS's.
-Tom
> You might consider placing all of the Linodes under your account and including the cost on your customer's invoice. You could also give each of them their own user.
That would give us more ownership of the client than we actually want. We're trying to establish a relationship where we are the client's trusted experts, not the owner of their site. The business model we envision has the client own the VPS while we do the more technical aspects of managing it. Therefore the expert relationship could be severed without disrupting operation of the VPS.
All the software we install in the client's VPS is free, and the client owns the data, so we only function as a referral expert.
This model is working well for us at Network Solutions, and we'd like to use it in hosting of the VPS.
@Azathoth:
Or in other words…. +1 for the reseller option @ Linode!
On the contrary. I'd actually prefer if my clients purchased the linode themselves, and I have access to their account for a few months while our company builds their project. Once delivered, we'd completely relinquish linode panel access and stick with our root or user access for maintenance. After that, the customer has their linode panel all to themselves.
Using a referral code would be nice (that is what referral codes are for, right?), but we're not reselling linode service.
