Posts Tagged ‘Web Hosts’

Tips to become a Web Hosting Reseller

Friday, June 27th, 2008

These are for the ones who want to become resellers. You can look for following in a hosting company you are trying to become a reseller of:-

1. What kind of support they are offering ie email only, ticketing system, phone support and a toll free phone. Email only is rather questionable.

2. Do they have physical office location? Most are part timers around.

3. Do they offer any restrictions to number of accounts in each package, This is a trap to keep you upgrading.

4. Do they offer over selling, yes it has a disadvantage, yet the way things are frankly new business cannot survive without it.

5. Do they offer domain registration reseller services as well? This keeps you compact.

6. Response time to early sales requests. If they are slow in sales cannot be good in support.

7. Years of experience. Do a whois lookup to see the domain life, OLD IS GOLD, thought the young ones can be even better.

8. Do they provide your name servers ie ns1.yourdomainname you shall need that.

9. Does the offering include dedicate IP and SSL, again at some point of time you shall need these.

10. Do you like them…. VERYY IMPORTANT.. IF YES FORGET THE TOP NINE..Have fun

How to succeed as a web hosting reseller?

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Web hosting services are in very high demand and therefore any reseller who knows what they are doing can make a bundle quickly without too much trouble. However, just like in any other business, one needs to be cautious and to be very much aware of exactly what they are doing.

The first and most important thing you need to do is find a reliable web hosting service. And that host also needs to have a good reseller program. There are not too many around that have this ideal combination but they are there, if you know where to look.

A reliable web host will mean that the clients you sign up will not run into problems and in case they do, the host must be able to provide proper customer service and respond quickly to any technical problems. This is very important because your reseller business will grow much faster if your current customers are able to refer others. Or if you can refer prospective customers to a portfolio of satisfied current clients.

You will be able to earn more with hosts that already have reseller programs as they will already have good packages on offer that you need to pay very little for and yet have high revenue potential with. Some reseller programs are specifically designed so that resellers are able to enter the web hosting business with very low overheads.

These days we have hosting services that have flexible plans. This will enable you to sign on a higher volume of customers and should also give you a more reliable and steady stream of income.

As a reseller you will also need to have a well thought out plan on how you are going to market and promote your own web site. There is no way your reseller program is going to be successful unless you have a system for attracting enough traffic to your web site so that you have a good chance of turning a high percentage of that number into actual paying clients who will pay the web host you are working with, so that you can in turn get your reseller commissions.

It is absolutely important for the reseller control panel at the web host to provide absolute control for you as a reseller to manage and invoice your clients. This is especially useful where you have a monthly payment system. In this case good records are imperative so as to ensure that follow up for payment is made as easy as possible. There are some hosts that even have private label features and offer multi lingual control panel.

Reseller Hosting - Your thoughts?

Friday, April 4th, 2008

Many of the “bigger” hosting companies that are out there charge significantly more then your mid to small range companies these days. Meanwhile other company’s battle the prices to a point where the margins on each account is so insignificant that the “care” of looking after peoples websites start to get lesser and lesser.

I guess what it all boils down to what you give to your clients. Do you back data up responsibility and have an affective disaster recovery procedure in place? How affective is your server monitoring? Do you have inbound support numbers? Do you offer 24 hour support?

Now you mentioned the advantages and disadvantages of UK vs US hosting. Consider the cost of hosting in UK can cost more then US based hosting servers, however your latency is nearly 4x quicker for customers if it is in UK. UK vs US hosting also has disaster recovery differences behind them too, do clients feel safe knowing that their information is in the hands of a foreign company and the time it takes to action such procedures in the case of event are going to be handled quickly and effectively?

The list really never stops, I’ve mentioned a few things but the punchline I’m trying to make is don’t follow a competitive trend simply because you see other companies “look” to be offering a sweeter deal then you. Find out why the sweeter deal exists. If you happen to loose a few customers along the way, it would of been a similar loss anyway if you had to drop your prices for them cut into your margins and lower the level of quality you provide.

Heck i know company’s charging businesses today nearly $40 a month for what most other hosting businesses consider a “lite” or “base” level packages. These company’s do quite well because they have the reputation behind them to do it and because a small business owner will fork out the extra $$ to simply know that every time they click that “send and receive” button on their email that its going to check the server effectively for emails and not deliver any funny errors and if funny errors do crop up they have someone to report the fault too, if it hasn’t already been discovered.

Some good advice on Reseller Hosting

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

A reseller is a hosting account which allows you to give or sell hosting to other people. A server owner gives hosting to a reseller who splits that hosting between his customers. Resellers are very rarely free. Reseller hosting is great because you can further subdivide your space and bandwidth and sell to end users. You can earn money from it, you can give it away; its your call. Resellers hosting does cost but if you’re interested in having your own reseller, you can get the best available offers. Rates shouldn’t matter much in the case of reseller hosting, always go for quality because you are always held responsible for all your clients in case the servers are down. So you need to find a reseller that can guarantee you that you will be able to make a profit on. Don’t necessarily look for the cheapest but look for a provider who allows easy package upgrades as you get more clients in future, this will also save you some money.

You DO NOT need 10 gig disk space if you are only hosting 5 or so people with 1 gig packages, so go small initially and then upgrade later as you get more people. This will also allow you to go for EVEN bigger packages in the future, bought with your profit. Summing up, a reseller account is an account you can buy from someone (usually) with a dedicated server, it is smaller, and a good way to start with a web hosting business before moving up to a dedicated server.

Reseller Hosting and Reseller Web Hosts

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Looking for reseller hosting? First let’s talk about the difference between reseller hosting and a regular web hosting. It’s important to know the differences between someone who is reselling web hosting (a reseller web hosting program) and an actual web host company because what’s at stake is your small business or personal website or a corporate business website.

Reseller Web Hosting vs. Actual Web Hosting Companies

A reseller of web hosting space does NOT own or manage the servers, links, networks and DNS that holds your precious web site. A reseller simply purchases a chunk of space from the parent web hosting and “resells” it out as his own for a profit. Conversely, actual web hosting companies, like those reviewed on this site actually own the machines and manages them from start to finish. Bottom line here is that a reseller of web hosting is simply a middleman. Therefore, online small business and other who use resellers should contemplate the following before deciding on using a reseller web host:

1) A reseller may set their own prices on shared web hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated web hosting servers they sell and that may or may not be a lower price than the parent web host.
2) If your site crashes or the server goes down, the reseller cannot help you, but has to go through to the actual web hosting provider to “fix” the issue. In this scenario you will have to trust that the reseller is actually communicating the problem accurately.

Although a reseller web host may provide you with what you are looking for, the question remains: Why not buy affordable web hosting directly from the source?

How to Tell You Are dealing With a Reseller

So let me ask you a question? Can you tell the difference between a webhosting company that is a resells and one that is the real McCoy?

Here are some things you can do to check if your web host is a reseller program:

1) Google “WhoIs” and check out the domain of the suspected reseller site.
2) One telltale sign of a webhosting reseller is that the name servers do not match the listed domain name. Find this out by checking any domain registrar.
3) Google the company online and see what you find about web host reselling. By the way, a great way to find reliable web hosting is top search out online web hosting reviews.
4) Here a novel approach: Speak to the sales department directly about the reselling issue.

Overall, the decision on whether or not you want to use a reseller web hosting service comes down to looking at several factors like price, reliability and web hosting options like Plesk or cPanel reseller hosting.