Becoming a successful web hosting reseller	Visited: 1735 5.0/5.0 (1 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Paul McIndoe August 29, 2008

Web hosting is an exciting first business venture for many people, and while it might sound difficult to begin with becoming a successful hosting reseller is actually a fairly simple process. In many cases, you don't even have to do anything apart from sell the services of an established web host through your own website.

It is especially appealing to web designers and developers as an addition to your existing services.

The first step to becoming a web host reseller is to find a web host who offers multiple website hosting accounts. By taking out a multiple domain account, you can use one domain for the development of your own site and then set up other domains to clients' websites. This enables you to pay a regular fee to the web host while charging clients any price you wish.

After setting up your domains to clients, it is preferable to have full administrative control over your clients' websites. Ensure that your web host provides not only yourself with a control panel that features full administrative facilities to manage your account, but also provides your clients with their own control panel too. Perhaps the most important feature your web host should offer is the facility to hide your web host's identity, preventing clients from knowing that you are offering a third party service.

It is also essential that your clients have a copy of your terms and conditions, which are paramount in any business. While the writing of terms and conditions can be time consuming, many web hosts may let you copy theirs or supply you with terms and conditions specifically written for this purpose. It is also important to provide your clients with fast and reliable support, solving any problems that arise with their websites as soon as possible. Failure to do so will result in unhappy clients and it will also reflect badly on your other services. Tools such as white label guides offered by web hosts can help with this.

One of the best aspects of the business of reseller hosting is that you can start out on this business venture even if you do not have a great deal of expertise. It is also the case that there are times when a reseller can be more scalable than a typical hosting firm, due to true web hosts being limited in its hardware. If a client suddenly requires an upgrade that the host was not prepared for, it will have to go through the time consuming and costly process of upgrading its hardware. A reseller host, however, can simply choose a different web host that will better suit the needs of their customers.

Reseller hosting can be a great profit making venture once you're up and running and understand the figures and profit margins involved. Buying web space from a major web host is relatively inexpensive and can be redistributed to site owners who need space for uploading their website at a suitable cost. What's more, some hosts allow customers to oversell the space they buy and do not charge extra unless your account usage exceeds a certain level, while others offer unlimited web space and bandwidth at no additional cost.

It is said the average user uses less than half of their allotted web space, which means you could double or even triple sell your quota, earning substantially more money in the long run.