If you’re in the technology industry or have always wanted a foothold in the business, this blog is for you.
What is Reseller Hosting?
Reseller Hosting allows you to rent out the resources that you buy from your hosting provider at a wholesale rate and sell it to clients at a profit.
Are you a web developer or designer?
Reseller hosting gives freelance web developers and designers a good avenue to expand their business model and offer hosting and other services to their clients. If your client is happy getting their website created/designed by you, they are also more likely to buy hosting and other services for their website from you.
The benefits of starting your business with Reseller Hosting/Program:
- Knowledge of technology required is limited : While it’s not true that you don’t need any technical knowledge (to market your business well, you do need to know your products well enough and what clients want), you don’t need to be a web wizard either.
- You can concentrate on what matters to you: Your hosting provider will take care of the management of your servers – leaving you free to concentrate on your marketing your business.
- You don’t need to build anything from scratch: You can customize/whitelabel the resources (whitelabel your control panel,website,etc) from your provider with your own brand name and logo
- Easy access to more allied products and services: You have access to other products and services to resell on the provider’s platform in addition to hosting.
- Become a wholesale provider yourself: Set up an allied model to provide reselling options to clients
Possible downsides you may face:
Your clients could be inconvenienced by any server downtime faced by your hosting provider. This makes it highly important to select a provider with high credibility. Apart from time in the business, also look at the quality and location of their data centres, number of resellers on their platform, platform features – and of course, check out customer testimonials.
How to get started with your own hosting business :
Step 1 : Choose a web hosting provider that offers Reseller Hosting:
Once you get into the web hosting business, you will grow from strength to strength on the vitality of your hosting provider. At a basic level, choose one that has :
- Been in the business for a while
- (ideally) has global reach and presence
- Offers good support
Step 2 : Purchase Reseller Hosting from your hosting provider:
Here’s a short video about just how easy that would be with WHM which gives you the ability to easily manage every single one of your customers’ hosting accounts with ease.
Step 3 : Set up your website:
Good hosting providers will already have ready-made, private,white-labeled and/ customizable websites complete with storefront and shopping cart to get you up and running in no time. If you have your own website, use your hosting provider’s APIs to integrate the website to their billing and pricing engine.
Step 4: Create your Reseller Hosting plans
Log into the control panel provided by your hosting provider to create the hosting plans you wish to sell which will consequently reflect on your website
Step 5 : Pricing:
Set your prices in the hosting provider’s engine. A good hosting provider will also regularly pass on offers and discounts that you, in turn, can pass to your clients.
Step 6 : Billing:
You can use your hosting provider’s billing system, integrate your own or just use the popular WHMCS system which is an all-in-one client management, billing and support solution perfect for a web hosting business.
Step 7 : Marketing and expansion:
On the hosting front, you’re all set now to just concentrate on marketing your business and adding any other related products such as domains,email and security solutions and other web services that your hosting provider offers.
That’s it. We hope we inspired you to either jump start the web business you’ve always been keen on breaking into or offer your clients a lot more than website development.
