As a web developer or designer, you may soon find that your outgoing costs are starting to add up. After all, you have to buy plugins, install programs, and learn new technologies. As a result, you’ll likely find that you need a secondary source of income.
There are many different ways to earn a secondary income, but reseller hosting can be incredibly profitable. Reseller hosting involves “renting” server space from a hosting provider and then selling it to your customers. You pay a fixed monthly fee to rent the space, and then you can charge your clients however much you’d like.
Consequently, this form of revenue can fit easily into an existing business. It can be an ideal solution for anyone with a strong client base, especially if you create or work on those clients’ websites. You can offer stable reseller hosting as a separate add-on, or you can make it a part of a design, development, and maintenance package. As a result, you will be offering your clients more value, and you will also be making their lives easier.
Read on to learn some tips for how to build a successful reseller hosting business.
Don’t Buy The Cheapest Hosting Plan
There are lots of web hosting companies that offer reselling plans at low prices. However, the cost is not the most critical factor when it comes to choosing a hosting plan. Instead, you should consider the features and support that the provider offers. Make sure the hosting plan you choose offers the following:
- An isolated control panel/cPanel WHM for each user you are servicing. This will ensure installs are isolated from one another.
- 24/7 365 customer support
- Over 99.95% uptime
- Free email accounts, FTP accounts, unlimited MySQL databases, and free SSL
- A free domain name
Adopt Private Nameservers
Using private nameservers offers a variety of benefits. For starters, it makes you look professional. Secondly, it lets you switch from one hosting provider to another if you become dissatisfied with the service your hosting provider is offering. This means that when you want to switch providers, you can migrate all your clients’ web hosting accounts without asking them to make changes on their end. Then, once you’ve finished the migration, all you have to do is change the nameservers’ IP to the new IPs provided by your new host.
Once you’ve activated your reseller account, private nameservers should be the first thing you configure after receiving your login credentials. The private nameservers are registered at the domain registrar, the same place you registered your domain name. Therefore, once the nameservers are registered, you also have to add DNS A records for them in your domain’s DNS zone.
Utilize a Corporate Billing System
A crucial key to your success will be your billing system. A corporate billing system will automate the management and support of your customers. It will also make it easier for you to communicate with them, and it will give you a professional look. Furthermore, a billing system will let you activate your clients’ orders automatically. This is essential because you can’t be online 24/7 to activate new orders, and you don’t want to make clients wait for the next time you come online.
Install an SSL Certificate
Security is a crucial part of your reseller hosting business. As a consequence of selling web hosting, you’ll be storing your customers’ personal details in your billing system on the server. Therefore, it’s essential that your clients feel confident that their personal data is secure and won’t be stolen. This is why you need an SSL certificate that will encrypt communication between the server and the visitor. Consequently, a third party won’t be able to sniff the traffic and steal private, personal information.
Offer 24/7 Support
The internet never sleeps, so you must be prepared to offer support to your customers at all times. The best way to handle customer support when you’re just starting is to find a company and outsource the technical support to them. This way, whenever any of your clients have questions, there will be someone available to answer them.
Summary
If you have web development, design, or website maintenance business, then adding reseller hosting to your client offerings is the ideal addition to your business. Reseller hosting lets you offer a more varied service to your clients and provides you with another income source.
If you want to run a successful reseller hosting business, you should consider doing the following:
- Seeking out a quality host rather than the one that’s least expensive,
- Using private nameservers,
- Implementing a corporate billing system,
- Installing an SSL certificate, and
- Offering 24/7 support.