I was thinking about getting a resaler hosting account. I'm just wondering if anyone has any pointers. Can you survive with the big dogs? Is anyone doing good as a resaler? Thanks
Every business has its high and low points. You have every chance of getting profit out of business. Dedication and hard work is the key.
I have a small hosting company, but don't really try to expand it at this point. Hosting isn't for me, and here are my reasons why... - 24x7 support - if you are running a hosting company, you better be available all the time in case there is a problem. Unless you have a good sized company, the income isn't worth it to me to be available 24x7. - skills - unless you really know what you are doing, you are going to have to hire someone to manage things for you which will kill a lot of your profit. If you aren't able to keep things secure and avoid problems with hackers, attacks, etc.... then you are putting all your clients at risk. Also, just being able to fix the problems of your customers requires a lot of varied skills. - over selling - the only way to really make any good money at the low end of hosting is to vastly oversell your server and I don't really like operating that way The other alternative would be to bundle website development with hosting and then you could possible charge premium prices. One thing that I have done a little of, and actually liked, was to concentrate on local small businesses. I was able to get much higher monthly fees by building a site and then offering them full support of the site and hosting bundled together for more like $50-60/month, vs. $10/month. But still, unless you do a LOT of these, you aren't making enough money to justify keeping yourself available ALL the time.
It's a thought market nowadays - people like 10GB space, 10TB of bandwidth for no more than $7-$10. Offering personal service and perhaps aiming at the local customers is a good way to grow.
Yes, would like to know also. So far the posts have been about starting your own proprietary hosting company and NOT reseller hosting. For reseller hosting, we are talking about selling hosting for a hosting company - where you earn commissions from them and you do not have to worry abt the operational aspects as you just pass orders to the hosting company
I wouldn't get into hosting unless you really know what you are doing and you can offer a USP (unique selling point); just getting a reselling server and stuffing that full trusting the admins of the company you rent the server from is crap. And those companies usually die off quite quickly. It is hard work, you do need technical knowledge (despite what the cpanel fanboys are shouting). If you do it well however; give great service, cool extra features (templates, template design, scripts, script development, free backup, clustering etc), you can become strong very fast. Don't grow too hard and you will have a stable, robust following in your clients who will do anything for you as you do for them. And you will have a solid basis in $ every month. As a poster already noted; most want a lot of GBs for a few $; that doesn't work; well it does sometimes, but in the long run you need to be lucky and have not too much servers dying of overload as you will die with them. I sell accounts for a lot of $/month and you get almost nothing. Still I have enough clients to make it very profitable; why? Because I offer extras which I built myself and which users really seem to like...
You're best bet for hosting is to sell to local companies, people that are not your typical webmaster types