Setting Up A Reseller Hosting Business? Let Us Show You How!

These days more and more people are looking to make their presence felt online. As a result, the web hosting industry is experiencing a boom. If you’re a web designer or developer looking to set up a hosting business, now is the time to look at reseller hosting.

Let’s wind back the clock. The biggest web hosting companies that you see today started out as one-man companies. These companies owned a single server, which they used to host their websites along with the websites of their customers. This model made sense as owning a single server dedicated to your website was and still is, an expensive undertaking. So, people started to come up with creative hosting solutions — one of which is Reseller Hosting.

Why Reselling?

Reseller Hosting, as its name suggests, is essentially buying a service and then selling it at a marked-up cost. You can purchase a bulk amount of space to host websites and then sell it- creating a profitable business. You can allocate space, bandwidth and other resources to your customers based on different plans for different budgets or different needs. Beyond this, setting up a reseller hosting business comes with many advantages, including:

1. Additional revenue: Apart from initial set up costs and registering clients, you’ll mostly be making money as opposed to spending it.
2. Adding to your Digital firm: If you run a digital company, offering hosting services will expand your services, bringing you closer to being a one-stop shop for all web services and solutions.

Sounds good right? Now, where should you start?

Setting up a reseller business — the steps

Make your space — Before you can offer other websites space, you’ll need to make yours in the market. Which simply means that before you buy, think about the customers you will be catering to. At this point in time — at the beginning — you won’t be able to compete with the biggest players in the market. So, target a specific niche.

What will be different about what you offer? Is it offering basic services at a low cost? Or will it be factors like speed, scalability, customer support, easy to use site builders? There are multiple factors that can set you apart from the competition. Do your research and find your niche before you start.

Choose your server — This option is for those of you who aren’t building a server but reselling server space from a hosting company. You can choose from:

1. Dedicated Server: This is a server dedicated to one client — all resources including bandwidth, speed, customer support and more will be focused on the sole website. This is for the kind of websites that see extremely high volumes of traffic and are designed in incredibly specific ways.
2. Cloud: Cloud eliminates the worry of scalability or infrastructure, which is perfect for a business that’s just starting out. Although the pricing range is somewhere in the middle, the cloud will ensure you have a smooth and consistent performance even if there are unexpected traffic surges on the websites.
3. Virtual Private Servers: Here you’ll be offering your customers, private and segmented hosting spaces, where they can run their own OS, choose their own bandwidth and store their files with greater security. This is perfect for a startup business, which needs multiple mid-size clients.

Creating your brand, plans and website:

1. Start with your brand name, logo and tagline. Choose a domain name that is available as you will have to build a company website.
2. The next step is your pricing plan. Balance out how much you’ll be spending to buy the hosting space, against how much you will be charging your customers and how much they will be willing to pay. You can either create very low-cost plans to undercut your competitors or create a range of plans (basic, medium and premium) based on your resources. The second option will allow you to cater to a wider range of clients but make sure you have the capabilities to carry it out. You’ll also need to choose how your payments will be processed — whether through a bank merchant account or internet-based payment processors. Will you be billing your customers monthly? Map out all your price-related solutions.
3. Finally, build a killer website! This will be the face of your company, so invest a little in setting up a smooth and impressive website. Include your hosting packages, additional services, discount, customer support chat and more, to your website.

Customer support — One of the most important services you’ll be providing for your customers is tech support. Make sure you have a team to respond to and work on your customer’s problems. This could mean a combination of a live chat, prompt replies to customer emails and a detailed set of FAQs’ to help solve basic problems. Great customer support can translate into great customer reviews, which means more customers and more business. What’s not to love about that?

Create a business entity — Now that you’ve done your research, created your business plan and charted out your customer support, it’s time to make your hosting business a legal entity. You can choose between a sole proprietorship, limited liability company or corporation. The first option is the easiest to do, however, the second and third option to do offer you better liability protection.

Amp up your marketing skills — You’re officially a business! However, there’s one additional step you can take to get the ball rolling (and continue to keep the ball rolling) and that’s investing in good SEO keyword research. Sure, you’ll need to do a considerable amount of networking to add to your client roster but investing in SEO keywords and marketing will also ensure that when customers search for hosting services, you’ll be at the top of their list. Start small — there are multiple SEO tools online to help you crack this. As your business grows you can then scale your keywords accordingly. Combine this with discounts, advertising and good word of mouth and your business will start to grow quickly.

So, now that you have the steps down, you know where to begin and what to do! Get started and good luck!