There are actually two uses for reseller hosting
accounts. Selling web hosting services, and hosting
multiple of your own domains under one account.
What this article is mostly about is the selling
part. Reseller hosting is a cheap way of starting your
own web hosting company. You purchase a reseller hosting
account, set up some payment solution, and sell web
hosting packages. Your job, besides selling is to
provide support to your customers. The actual web host
stays in the background, running the servers, and
provide support to you whenever you need it. Your
customers will never have any direct contact with the
actual web host, they don't even have to know that you
are not running the servers.
Different reseller accounts
There are basically 2 types of reseller accounts. One
(traditional) where you purchase separate accounts at a
discount, and resell them. With the other type (bulk),
you purchase a big web hosting account, where you can
divide the disk space and data transfer into smaller
accounts. You can also specify the accounts exactly like
you want.
With the traditional type, you don't have to buy
anything before it is sold, but with a bulk account you
have more options. The price of a typical entry-level
bulk account is around $30/month. This normally includes
1 gb disk space and 20gb of data transfer. So you can
sell 20 accounts with 50 mb disk space, and 1 gb data
transfer. With a price of $5/month per account, you can
see the potential profits.
Your own web hosting business
A reseller hosting plan can be the first step towards
a lucrative business. The market for web hosting is
huge, just as the possible profits. But the competition
is extremely hard and advertising your web hosting
business is expensive. So it is easy to disappear in the
crowd, and hard to get your web hosting business of the
ground.
If you already have access to customers (f.ex. if you
are a web designer) you can start by hosting your
clients' websites. This can create a nice income in
addition to your design services. Getting those first
customers is also a major step for new hosting
businesses, as word of mouth is the cheapest and most
effective marketing there is.
A web hosting business is not for all of us. Offering
support to your customers, setting up new accounts,
monitoring servers etc. can easily become a 24/7 job.
Good planning and automation of tasks help, but running
a web hosting company is definitely not a nine to five
job.
Name servers
One thing you should know about is name servers. Name
servers are essential for pointing a domain name to a
web hosting account. You can normally use your web
host's name servers, but it looks unprofessional to have
ns1.acmehost.com and ns2.acmehost.com as nameservers,
because your customers will then know that you are
reselling for acmehost.
There are 2 solutions to the problem. Anonymous name
servers, which does not contain any web host's name. One
example is ns5.edns1.net. The other, and best solution
is your own nameservers. They will typically be
ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com, so they give
no signs that you are a reseller. You can also change
web hosts without having to change name servers, so a
move to a new web host does not have to affect your
customers. There is sometimes a small cost associated
with this, but it is a good investment.
