Reseller Hosting Guide

Many recent advancements to internet technology have created an array of business opportunities for webmasters, web designers and other people in the IT field. For instance, those who want to supplement their offline earnings on the web should consider a reseller hosting service. Nowadays, many people run their own blogs, web sites and other interactive online services. Although they need to code appealing and useable sites, these webmasters must also secure reliable web hosting to display their product or service to potential customers. This is a void that can be filled by reseller hosting.

As a reseller, you can buy a large hosting package from a reputable web host provider, divide it into smaller packages, and sell these packages to other webmasters along wither any other products you offer. Therefore, you can provide a cheaper web hosting service that caters for all their needs. Reseller web hosting is profitable, especially if you target webmasters who do not eat up a lot of physical storage space and bandwidth.

Start Your Own Hosting Business

Web hosting is among the most profitable business ventures on the web. If you have any desire to pursue starting your own company with reseller hosting, you should read on and follow this guide to reseller hosting to see if it's a viable business venture for you. Reseller hosting is ideal for many entrepreneurs seeking to start their own business because you don't actually have to own, maintain or manage any servers or networking hardware. All of this is taken care of by the reseller hosting provider. You simply sell access to their servers and network through your reseller hosting account.

Before you even begin to offer hosting services through a reseller account you should consider a few key factors. First, you should plan and plan some more. You need to define the specific clients that your hosting service will target and the services they require. Generally, the customers whom you target will dictate the services and products to be offered along with the bandwidth/storage specifications of your hosting plans. You should create a comprehensive list of products and services that you wish to offer through your hosting business and market them appropriately to set yourself apart from the crowd. This can be a challenge with a reseller account because the web hosting niche is very crowded, so the more value you provide to your customers the better chance you will have of running a profitable, long-lasting web hosting business.

Finding A Reseller Hosting Provider

After defining your hosting requirements, you now need to do a bit of legwork to find a web hosting company with a good reputation who also offer reseller hosting services. You should start your search based on desirable hosting attributes such as uptime record, disk space, technical support, bandwidth and availability of a control panel like cPanel. It is vital to select a reseller hosting provider you can trust because they will be the ones you rely on to bolster your own reputation. If any problems or downtime does occur, it will be you who has answer to your customers, not them.

If you choose poorly and go with a bad web host provider that same quality of service will be passed on to your customers. This is not good for those who wish to create a growing and loyal customer base to maximize profits. Consequently, you must choose a reseller hosting provider that offers a good uptime guarantee, plentiful bandwidth and storage space, fast technical support and transparency. What is meant by transparency is how much ability the reseller provides to completely customize your service plans, control panels, nameservers and billing solution with your own branding so it's not readily noticeable that you are merely a web hosting reseller.

Web Host Manager

Most reputable reseller hosting providers will allow you access to a product called Web Host Manager (WHM), a reseller control panel. WHM will enable you to create smaller hosting accounts with their own control panels by partitioning out the space and bandwidth resources of your master reseller account. Your clients can then use their own control panel to create their blog or web site. They can also add domains or subdomains, change passwords and install additional scripts and software applications, as is the case in normal hosting.

Customer Support

Finally, reseller clients need customer support. Customer support will have to be provided by you, unless your reseller provider offers additional customer support to your customer base as well. Not all reseller hosting providers offer this service, so choose wisely if you do not have the technical knowledge or money to hire your own customer support team. Their are many support ticket and customer service chat scripts available for free, such as osTicket and Hesk, should you choose to handle customer support own your own.

Benefits of Reseller Hosting

Reseller web hosting is among the most profitable of online ventures. This is due to the constant need for cheap web hosting. Those who start with reseller hosting will enjoy its recurring revenue and level playing field that all parent hosting providers enforce without the hassle of buying, installing, securing and managing dedicated servers. Moreover, reseller hosting is relatively easy to setup and requires very little starting capital. You will also enjoy the flexibility of developing your own custom tailored hosting plans, while receiving the backing of a reputable and experienced web hosting provider.