Discourse "reseller" type hosting?

Installation Hosting
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Hi there. Had an interesting question come up today:

Does the Discourse Team (or anyone else) have any type of arrangements for what was formerly known in the web hosting world as “resellers”?

In other words, let’s say I want to set up & run several “standalone” Discourse sites for my clients. I’d like to be a site-level admin of each one for setup, admin, customization, moderating, etc., but I don’t want to actually run & maintain the servers, upgrades, etc. I’d also like to have centralized invoicing so I can pay for everything directly.

Does anyone offer such a service?

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Pretty much anyone would let you do that, I’d imagine. I’m pretty sure that the good folks at discourse.org don’t care who’s paying the bills or what you charge the people you’re running them for.

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Yep, we already have customers who are paying for hosting on behalf of a client that they’re doing an assortment of web work for.

Nothing special to this arrangement really, unless I’m missing something.

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In fact @pfaffman is the person I’d recommend to help you with this! Reasonable rates, knows his stuff, and always professional.

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I guess I had in mind the idea that used to be common some years back with web hosting, where you could buy a “block” of services that might include something like “5 IP addresses” or “250 email accounts”, which you could then divide up amongst your clients as you saw fit.

Maybe I’m overthinking it with the actual functionality being what it is … although maybe a single bill each month would be nice for something like this. :slight_smile:

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I’ve done some work in an interface that would let you do something like that. It’s not quite ready for humans to use.

Until then, I can imagine a couple ways to work out such a plan.

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We at Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting) offer that: our admin / provisioning / payment system allows multiple forums under one site-level admin account with centralized billing. We have several customers/agencies with such a setup. Depending on your volume we can work out a good deal on pricing as well!

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