Reseller hosting is a kind of white label approach to selling hosting services. It allows anyone to sell them without owning any of the actual equipment or having the technical expertise. Instead, a hosting provider lets them resell their services either under the company’s name or under their own brand name.
Many of the hosting companies out there are actually resellers, and the fact that they’re often small businesses points to the appeal of this arrangement. As reseller hosting programs develop in both their sophistication and automation, people without much web hosting knowledge or experience can set themselves up as hosting providers with relative ease. The hosting company manages almost everything, including technical support, orders and server admin, and they even provide management tools which make it easy for resellers to manage their accounts.
No Upfront Investment
There’s no initial cost involved unless you want to rent a server or pay ahead for certain services, so starting out in reseller web hosting usually costs you no more than the cost of a domain and a hosting plan for the reseller website. Of course, if you have one already then you’re good to go.
All this makes it an attractive proposition for people who are looking to start a business but don’t have much capital. If that appeals to you then hosting companies will even help you to start your own brand, offering extra services that hide your reseller status, so the end-user will never know that you’re in business selling somebody else’s services for them.
Some companies can also provide bespoke plans, remote forms, control panels or complete hosting reseller stores. Total anonymity is maintained by using a private DNS cluster that lets you create your own private network, with control panel, order and payment pages all on your own name server.
Is Reseller Hosting Lucrative?
It’s never easy beginning a new business, but at least the web hosting market is so big that it’s filled with plenty of opportunity. While there is a lot of scope to do well, the amount you can potentially make from reseller web hosting depends on a few things. The quality of the service you’re providing is in the hands of the company that you’re reselling it for, so you can’t really control that. As a reseller you need to focus on what you can control, such as your store, your advertising, marketing, and SEO.
You need to carefully monitor your site traffic and focus strongly on finding and retaining customers. If you’re doing remote selling (selling services from a website that you already created which has good traffic already) you will find customer acquisition and retention easier, particularly if you offer hosting as an additional service.
Services Resellers Could Offer
Many hosting companies offer a wide variety of different packages, including free and paid shared hosting, dedicated or semi-dedicated hosting, VPS and cloud hosting services. Many offer domains, SSL certificates, website creation, web and graphic design and more. The reseller can also rent their own dedicated server.
Types of Reseller Hosting
Your choices are to resell services that you have paid for upfront, or services that are on offer from the hosting company that you haven’t paid for. Selling these on earns you commission. You need a website to sell from, and if you have one already then great, you can use the company’s remote reseller tools if they offer them. If not, it’s fairly simple to build a new web store from the pre-prepared templates that some hosting companies offer. And as we already said, the anonymity of your brand is covered.
Offer Free Hosting Plans
As a reseller, your hosting provider will typically sell you their services at wholesale prices, allowing you to decide on your own prices and plans.
You will make money from commission, but some companies might also give bonus or discount offers. If you’re in a position where you can offer free website hosting, then you will find it much easier to draw in new clients. The reason for this is that the promise of free hosting is initially attractive, but users often outgrow the limitations of free services. If they’re happy with what you offer, they will stick with you when they upgrade to a paid account, so you suddenly have a more valuable customer.
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