Steps to Reselling

Web Hosting Reseller Business: A good option

A web host reseller account is a web hosting account that allows you to create hosting packages to sell to your clients. You can also host multiple sites of your own using the disk space allotted to the one hosting account. They come with a reseller-level control panel that allows you to create your own packages. You can allocate disk space and bandwidth to each site on the account and change the space and bandwidth specifications if the site’s needs change.

Most reseller accounts provide the option for private name servers. With a web host reseller account, you handle account setup, billing, and (usually) support for your clients. Your web host provider maintains the servers and answers your support questions. While a few starter reseller-hosting packages are as small as 500 MB, most reseller providers offer packages starting at 1 GB or larger. A range of packages is usually available, a few going as high as 30 GB of disk space.

Advantages of having a reseller account are having more flexibility with your web hosting accounts, saving of money, earning more revenue at little cost, focusing on customer support and leave technical support to web host, maintenance cost to be absorbed by your web host.

Steps to becoming a web host reseller start with choosing the platform that you want to use. Here it should be noted that open source software programs that are available for Linux are more than that for Windows hence reducing the cost for Linux. But a site requiring a MS or ASP Access requires a Windows platform. Secondly, you have to choose the control panel you plan to use. Control panels range from being very basic in nature to being loaded with large number of features. As a reseller, control panel for setting up and controlling hosting accounts would be needed by you.

Then you have to choose your web host, it is a key decision and your business success depends on its quality. Factors that could be considered while choosing a web host for a reseller account are the platform and control panel, Account features, The company’s reputation, The record of server uptime, The level of support, Flexibility, How long the web host has been in business and last but not the least is the price.

Then comes setting up your hosting plans and prices…. firstly your bandwidth has to be divided by your disk space to find out the ratio of one is to other. For pricing, competitive pricing should be adopted, but any additional services, if provided, should be reasonably charged. Then comes developing a business website in which three main choices are Creating a website using an existing website template, Hiring a designer or a design company to design a site, designing it yourself, Include all the useful information that clients would want to gather about your company and its services and making your site e- commerce ready. Of course, to be able to accept payments for hosting accounts, you’ll to set up an SSL certificate, a merchant account and lastly a payment gateway. Also, you have to have a helpdesk since it allows clients to contact you with support requests and you to track and respond to those requests.

You would also have to set up an automated billing system by which clients would be billed and payments would be registered with little effort. Some popular billing and payment processing systems are Modernbill, ClientExec, WHM.Autopilot, Whois.Cart. Also, it should be ensured that the billing software program you choose is compatible with your server platform. Obviously, you have to create a welcome email in which you would have to include a confirmation of the plan details, the nameserver names, a username and temporary password, a link to the control panel, links to your knowledge base / FAQ and to your helpdesk.

Last but not the least you have to market your website i.e.; submitting your site to search engines, telling your family, friends, and business acquaintances about it, include a link to it in your signature line in outgoing emails. You should also market your website via incoming links, advertising, special offers and newsletters.

Copyright © 2005 WebHostAuditor.com
More Reseller Hosting Articles