The World Wide Web has become a commodity in our life. People spent more than 12 hours per day on the internet; billions of dollars are transacted through the internet; internet sales are going up every year and etc. Therefore the idea of setting up web hosting companies to cater for this internet needs is more and more popular among entrepreneurs.
However a big cost will involve when you are setting up a web hosting company because that kind of business needs great computing resources and dedicated internet connections. Also other hosting facilities like power supply and air conditioning are all big cost for a business start up. For beginner entrepreneurs, they might not afford to have the initial cost or to cope with the risk. So if you are one of them reseller hosting is definitely your choice.
So what is reseller hosting? Basically reseller hosting account is a web hosting account that you can customize the hosting features and resell it to others. How reseller hosting works is you get a reseller hosting from other big web hosting company. The company has already set up properly a master control panel for you and you can easily control and customize the hosting features. For example you buy a reseller hosting with 50 Gbytes, then you divide it into 10 smaller hosting account with 5 Gbytes each account, you look for 10 customers and sell the service to them. You charge the 10 customers for the service and typically the total charges will be more than what you need to pay to the bigger hosting company. So the difference will be your profit.
Isn’t it sounds easy? You get a reseller account and look for customers. You give them a customized web hosting and they pay you. You direct all the problems back to your reseller hosting company and you enjoy the money every month.
In fact it is true and false. It is true because the initial reseller hosting provider will prepare everything for you. They will get your reseller hosting account ready with program like web host manager in Hostgator. This kind of tool will allow you to create your customer accounts easily. After account is set up, your customer can instantly access to the hosting space and start administering their websites. Your customers will have their own control panel in their hosting and scripts. So basically it is almost an automated process.
However I said it is false because it will somehow involve minimal technical issues. If you are not really equipped with IT and web hosting knowledge, you either should get a book and start learning or opt out for the business. Although the business proposal sounds easy with the redirection of issues back to the initial providers, your customers eventually are still dealing with you. If you fail to give a solid support to your customers and the support of initial hosting does not come in time, customer will lose confidence on you. And also with the stiff competition in the industry it is a challenge to market your hosting services.
So now you roughly know the pro and con of reseller hosting business. It sounds more bitter than sweet. However the good news is stiff competition always means good money behind. If you survive the war lucrative income is not difficult at all. So if you are doing some serious planning on reseller hosting business, a suggestion is that you should always choose a quality web hosting as your provider. Because if the hosting has good quality you will save a lot of headache in dealing with downtime and other critical technical issues; if their support are great then you can rely on them to solve your customers’ issues; if their hosting features and scripting are sufficient it gains plus point for your products. Basically if you get a quality reseller hosting, your web hosting company has a quality service too.
