Building your Hosting Plans - Resellers
Are you ready to make your hosting plans to sell to your clients? This article provides you with information to get started with your hosting business. Good Luck!
Purchasing pre-made plans to resell is easy, but then you are locked into those plans. If you bought bulk plans (x amount of disk space and bandwidth), then you need to consider how to distribute your resources. However, the bulk plans is the best way to go unless you plan on hosting very large sites with heavy traffic. Many of the bulk plans only offer 1 or 2 gigabytes of space and 10 - 20 gigabytes of bandwidth. If you sell 4 or 5, 500-megabyte sites at 5-gigabytes each of bandwidth, your resources are used up. But, many of the pre-made reseller plans offer 500mbs plans with up to 10gig in bandwidth at a good price.
It is easier for monthly billing and a lot less problems if someone wants a refund, since in web hosting, a monthly hosting client is also considered an asset while a yearly client is debit. The monthly client owes you money every month, while you owe the yearly client 12 months of service. If you do offer a yearly plan, make it a special offer.
Buying bulk can be very profitable if you can fine the right clients, i.e. small businesses, Mom & Pop type businesses, hobby sites and personal websites. With these types of accounts you could easily host 100 clients. At $5 to $10 each this would be very profitable. 100 sites x $7 = $700 - your cost $100 max = $600 profit. Of course, you have to find these types of clients and that may not be easy but it is possible.
You get your own virtual name servers with most of these accounts (ns1.yourname.com; ns2.yourname.com). That way, if someone were to do a WHOIS, it will list your domain for the name servers. You will need to register your new virtual name servers with your domain registrar; this is not the same as when you just switch to a new host. Check with your registrar or your new host if you are not sure how to enter the information. There are still ways to tell that you are on another host’s server though, so if anyone asks, you should admit that you are a reseller.
Only you who can decide what will be best for your business. Remember it is much easier to drop your prices then to raise them, so price accordingly. Whatever you do, make sure that you research any host comprehensively before signing up. Many hosts do not offer refunds on reseller accounts!
Pre-made Plans
With these plans, you usually sign-up for one of the hosts’ regular plans and pay the monthly fee, plus a one-time fee of $10 to $20 to be a reseller. One of the big advantages is that you don’t have to worry about overselling. You should be able to copy the plan information from your host, most even say that on their reseller page, but if you don’t see it mentioned ask first. Another advantage is a lower startup cost because you are only paying for what you need and when you need it. If you don’t get many clients at first, this will save you a lot of money.
Bulk Plans
With almost all bulk plans, you will get complete control over what plans you make. The first step is to check around and see what some of the better know hosts are offering as a starting point, but remember that a well known host can generally charge a little more because they are well established.
When making up your plans you need to decide what kind of clients you want to target. Smaller plans tend to attract small business and personal sites with static pages. Bigger plans will attract bigger high volume sites. The best thing to do is find some middle ground and stay there. The big advantage of buying bulk is you can sell a good mix of plans.
Figure out how many clients you will need to make a profit with different size plans. You need to ask your-self what kind of support do you plan to offer? Do you plan on paying anyone else for sales or support? Do you plan on paying for advertising? You have to remember to pay yourself what you are worth; you will not last long supporting customers 18 hours a day for pennies.
The one big concern is the temptation to oversell your resources. This is something that has become more and more prevalent in the last couple of years. Unless you actually know your clients in person, you have no idea how much of their disk space or bandwidth they will use. If you can easily purchase more burstable bandwidth at a low cost from your host, then bandwidth should not be a problem. One warning though, make sure your host can live up to their end. You don’t want your site or your client’s sites shut down for going over on bandwidth.
Actually, overselling is not recommended at all, but if you do, keep it reasonable, which means maybe 10% to 15% on drive space. Remember you must be able to fulfill your contract with the clients.
The other touchy subject is Unlimited Space and Bandwidth. There is of course no such thing as unlimited anything in the hosting business. Everything has limits; the server you are on only has a fixed amount of drive space, memory and CPU resources. Bandwidth is no different.
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