How to make money reselling web hosting?

posted by Farhan on January 10, 2020

So you want to be a web hosting reseller?

Congratulations! Because it means you have a good business mind and know the value of a scalable business model in an exponentially growing web hosting market. But wait, there is more to it. The web hosting industry is super saturated at this point so having a very strong business plan is very important. My opinion is 2 business plans work well even in 2019. One is acquiring a profitable existing web hosting company and the second is finding an unexplored niche in the web hosting market which is not being serviced well at the moment. So market research should be your best friend when starting out in web hosting or any other business you do.

The purpose of this article is to show you how to make money reselling web hosting and how quick and easy it is to start your own reseller web hosting business. This is for those who have Web Developers to make websites for companies. So you can offer them web hosting and charge them for recurring revenue is also for those who are just entrepreneurs looking for ways to start making money online. There’s never been a larger opportunity than to selling web hosting and domain since they’re needed by everyone, regardless of the type of website they create. We are here to show you exactly what you need to get set up and also how to set it up step by step and you’ll quickly learn that it doesn’t take a techie guru or a computer programmer or even PHP programmer to do any of these. It’s all very straightforward point and click type stuff. We hope you enjoy these
tips on how to make money reselling web hosting.

What is reseller hosting?
Reseller web hosting is basically where you buy a web host’s hard drive space and bandwidth and then sell it to your own customers. It’s like renting a block of apartments and then letting individual clients have the bedrooms. Many web hosts have hosting packages for their
customers who are resellers.

The benefits of reseller hosting Reseller hosting has quite a few advantages.

For a start, it enables you to offer a wider range of services to your clients. As a web developer, for example, you can become a one-stop-shop: there’s no need for your clients to go elsewhere, they can get everything they need directly from you.


Reselling allows you to create your own brand of hosting. Good reseller packages are white-labeled, so your clients never know who is your vendor. This enables you to create your own,unique hosting plans which can be customized to meet your client’s needs. You can set up,maintain and managing the back-end of the websites of your client and manage domains and emails. And you can charge for this service, of course.
Since you can rent additional resources as your reselling service increases this means you can start small and expand as and when demand is required. Perhaps best of all, since you use your own web host’s software, server management is done for you. No expertise is needed in this field. Of instance, the greatest benefit is a financial one. By selling hosting, short-term clients become long-term customers. As a result, the lifetime value of your customer’s increases and you get a
steady income over the long term, helping with cash flow and profits.

What does a reseller package include?

Reseller packages can vary from host to host, but most of them provide the following:
● Disc Space and Bandwidth
● Domain hosting
● White label branding
● cPanel / WHM control panels for Linux or Plesk 12 control panels for Windows
● Customized account and website management for clients.
● Additional hosting features for clients, e.g. email, cPanel, and security tools
● Technical support (usually 24/7) offered by hosting provider

What services does your web host provide?
A common concern of those contemplating the establishment of a reseller hosting company is that they lack the technical expertise. However, this is not an issue. Web hosts are keen to sell reseller packages and recognize that these technical abilities are not open to most people who want to start with reselling.
A great provider will, therefore, take care of all the backend services for you. This includes setting up and maintaining the physical hardware and network infrastructure, and undertaking
security monitoring, patching and software updates on your behalf.
You should also get 24/7 technical support if there are any issues, together with guaranteed uptime levels of 99.95% backed by service level agreement (SLA).

What to do before going to start to offer the reseller hosting?
Before you start offering to host your clients, here are some of the things you will need to consider. Decide on the best customer hosting packages.
If your hosting service is going to be a success, it needs to meet your customers ‘ needs. Therefore, the products you provide should be focused on those needs rather than determined by your reseller account’s resources and features. If you are a web developer, you’ll have a good idea of the businesses you cater to and the type of hosting that would suit them best. If you are operating in a different field, the target market may need to be explored first.
Things to consider include the amount of disc space and the number of clients needingbandwidth, the types of software they will use to build their websites, the number of email accounts they want and their security needs (remote backups, malware, and intrusion detection,
SSL, etc.).

You might want to put together a variety of different options for your customers to choose from which they can upgrade as their business grows.
Manage your own growth. If this is your first foray into hosting, it’s a good idea to start out small. This will give you time to learn about hosting whilst growing your client list. If you grow even bigger, we can upgrade your
reseller services to a dedicated server or cloud environment for you.


Avoid overselling
Overselling in web hosting is the practice of offering too many web hosting plans that, when combined, have a total demand for resources that surpass a server’s capacity. Some web hosts
do this because they don’t expect all customers to fully utilize their hosting plans. However, if they do, the server would not be able to cope. This can lead to slow performance and even the client’s websites going offline. It’s not good for business.
When you set up your reseller business, you should always aim to leave 30% of your disk space free. This redundant 30% can be used for existing customers who need extra space and to ensure all resources are never fully used up. You need to work that 30% redundancy into any costings and forecasts you prepare.

Make sure you provide great customer service
Providing actual hosting is the easy part of being a reseller host. Your provider takes care of most of the technical stuff and once you have configured your plans and set up your customer’s accounts, most other things are automated.
However, your customers will have issues from time to time and it’s your response to these that can make or break your business. Prospective customers will expect a quick reply when enquiring about a package and existing customers will expect an equally swift response to any
issues. You should, therefore, make sure you have the in-house capacity (both in terms of staffing levels and staffing expertise) to deal with these. If you don’t, you may have to find a way of outsourcing your hosting customer services to bigger companies like us.

You should consider other satisfaction metrics, too, such as security and reliability. You and your customers need to be confident that the level of security you have is adequate. This means taking proper and effective precautions with your own server (enforcing clients to use strong passwords, etc.) and ensuring that your host provides necessary security measures, such as intrusion monitoring and daily backups. Reliability is also crucial to your success as a reseller. None of your clients will want their website going offline as it gives a poor impression of their businesses and may even cause financial loss to them. It won’t do your reputation much good either. For this reason, you should make sure that you have measures in place to minimize potential downtime (such as not overselling). You should also check the reliability and uptime rates of your host. You and your customers should never tolerate anything below 99.9% uptime.

Conclusion
From reading this article, you should now have a wider understanding of what a hosting reseller is and how you can offer hosting to your clients as a way of extending your own business. You should also understand the benefits of reseller hosting and the things you need to consider before offering hosting as a service.

If you are interested in becoming a hosting reseller, take a look at our range of affordable reseller plans. If you have any questions feel free to ask questions in the comment section below and we will do our best to answer them as soon as possible.

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