Gaining revenue by becoming a hosting reseller can be a great way to expand your clientele or start a new company without having to deal with the hassles of building and maintaining your own infrastructure. Utilizing your technical hosting expertise, you can gain a steady stream of income and establish enduring relationships with clients.
However, before you can provide an appealing and trustworthy service, you must make strategic plans and investments, just like any other business. These five easy steps will help you become a successful reseller of hosting when you first start out.
Select a host
Since the service your host provides you with will directly affect the service you provide to your customers, this could be the most crucial step. When looking for a host, you should consider the following questions:
- Do they have a good reputation? Check reviews, Twitter, forums etc.
- Do they have complete ownership and control over their infrastructure? This includes their data centres and network.
- Do they offer customisable server deployments? Whether it be a scalable bare metal cloud or a dedicated server environment, can you completely customise your hardware and software to your requirements?
- Do they offer application support for resellers? Either for leading billing software, control panels or your own systems, you need API integration.
- Do they offer generous discounts for resellers? As you grow your customer-base, do you retain more revenue per acquisition?
Choose your hosting package
Reselling allocated space on a dedicated server is the traditional method of reseller hosting, but cloud environments—where your reseller package and your customers’ packages can be easily scaled—are becoming more and more common. Regardless of your preference, you should base your hosting package selection and customization on your budget, your expectations for customer requirements, and your estimate of customer growth. You can provide your customers with better performance and gain a competitive edge by customizing every aspect of your server setup, such as the type of hard drive installed or the number of cores available.
Create your own hosting packages
Once more, the hosting packages you provide will depend on your assumptions about your target clientele. Your pricing strategy is an important factor to take into account. The pricing of your plans should be determined by factors like resource allocation (disk space, bandwidth, databases, etc.), the kind of hardware and software instances that are available, and the caliber of support, as you will typically not be able to compete with large hosting companies only on price.
Plan your support system
To manage and support your customers, you’ll need billing software, ticketing software, and a control panel. It’s common practice to handle billing and support using WHMCS, the industry-leading web hosting automation platform, so you might want to look for a hosting company that offers a WHMCS plugin. Whichever option you select, you must become familiar with your system because it will serve as the foundation for all of your consumer communications.
The logistics of the support you provide must also be planned; these include the hours of support (which should be included in your pricing) and the agreement you have with your host about handling hardware issues.
Define your terms of service
It is imperative for all hosts, including resellers, to establish clear terms and conditions of service in order to deter unlawful, abusive, or disruptive customer behavior. This must comply with the host’s acceptable usage guidelines for resellers. This is usually available on the host’s website, but to establish your documentation and make sure it is compliant with the law, you should get in touch with your host if you require any additional advice or assistance.
Get your hosting business online
It is necessary for you to market your hosting services, just like any other business. Naturally, this entails building an e-commerce website or, if web hosting is a logical progression of your current offerings, enhancing your current company website with landing pages and support system features.
You can use display or search ads, create an organic content marketing plan, or take a different approach to your marketing strategy from this point on.
Managing reseller hosting like a business is essential to its success. Regardless of whether you offer applications or managed infrastructure services, your clients anticipate dependability and expertise. The basis for this is established by the host you use for your reseller service, so selecting a host at the outset is crucial in many ways.