What Is Reseller Hosting – Your Key to Success

What Is Reseller Hosting – Your Key to Success



Millions of individuals and businesses build websites every year. That number grows each year as the Internet continues to increase in popularity. There is a huge opportunity to capitalize on that growth, and one of the best ways to do that is through reseller web hosting.  A person involved in this business can provide individuals with all the tools and resources they need to create their online presence. In order to be successful in this industry there are a few steps that need to be followed in order to get up and running.

Find a Reputable Reseller Hosting Provider

Perhaps the easiest and quickest way to get started is to leverage a company that already has the infrastructure to support your venture. You do not need to invest in hardware like servers when you can purchase plans from other companies who have already invested in the technology.

You can get a plan from a company like IceStorm.com, for example, to get started.  For under $20 you can get a plan that supports unlimited accounts. Therefore, you can support an unlimited number of clients and websites for a low investment. Then as your needs grow you can upgrade to other plans giving you more space or bandwidth.

Create Hosting Packages

You will want to come up with different hosting packages for your service. Start with at least three plans offering different amounts of disk space, bandwidth, email accounts, databases, etc. The more you offer, the more you will charge for the service.

Build Your Own Online Presence

You cannot be a hosting provider without a website of your own. You will need a website to promote your services and plans to potential customers.  It is a good idea to talk about what you offer and features like software, reporting, operating system and web hosting platform.  For example, many web hosting reseller run on the Linux operating system and cPanel for the hosting control panel. Some potential customers will be looking for this type of information so it is a good idea to place it on the website.

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Get Customers

Getting customers can be the biggest challenge of running a reseller web hosting service. There are many different strategies you can do in order to obtain customers.

First you can focus on your geographic area. Many hosting companies market worldwide. In order to separate yourself from that competition you could choose to go after businesses and individuals where you live. You could differentiate yourself because you will show potential customers that you are local and more accessible.

Alternatively, you can focus on a certain niche of industry. For example, you can provide hosting for dentists, doctors or chiropractors. Again, this separates you from your competitors because you can establish yourself as an expert in a certain field, and your customers will believe you understand their needs better than other generic hosting companies.

Or, maybe you can offer hosting as a secondary product to another product. Perhaps you can develop websites, or you offer online marketing services to companies. If so, you can offer to sell hosting services to your customers as a way better serve your customers and add residual income to your bottom line.

If you are going to go broad, however, you can still acquire customers. You just need to be prepared to start small until your brand becomes known and people start talking about your company. You can register at various web hosting directories, use pay per click advertising, generate buzz on social media and perform search engine optimization tasks to get your site ranked.  This strategy will take some effort, time and maybe some investment, however.

Provide Stellar Support

One of the greatest benefits of being a hosting reseller is the residual income. But, to keep that money coming in you need to provide outstanding support to your customers.  If you do that they will keep their website with you, and tell others about you as well. On the other hand, if you ignore their issues they will go elsewhere and possibly leave negative comments about you online.

It takes a great deal of effort, and sometimes expense, to acquire customers. So, do not have the mindset that once you have them you can ignore them and only worry about getting more customers.  A customer that has been paying you for months is worth more to you than finding new customers.

Upsells

Another great thing about being a web hosting reseller is it gives you an opportunity to sell related items and increase the return on each customer.

Many people who host a single website will eventually be in the market to add more websites to their portfolio. You can provide design services to customers. This can be done in house or can be outsourced to other people.

Another great upsell is offering search engine optimization or SEO services. This is helping people get their websites noticed and found in the search engines like Google. More and more web site owners are aware of SEO, and they are looking for providers. You can offer these services to your customers once they host with you. Again, it is something that can be done in house or outsourced elsewhere.

As you can see, being a web hosting reseller has great potential for income. It can also be a rewarding business to run. Much of it can be done from anywhere making it an ideal business for people who want to work from home or have flexibility. It is a competitive field, but with a little imagination a person can make their hosting company stand out from the crowd and be profitable.