Becoming a hosting reseller is a highly lucrative business these days because of its Asset light nature of the business model. You don’t need to own hardware or infrastructure but instead, you can simply take it as a service from a third party and cross-sell it to your clients like it is yours. This will fetch you good returns in the long run and you don’t have to deal with the complexities of setting up and managing your own infrastructure. To become a successful hosting reseller you must offer services that are in high demand like offering high-end bare metal servers/cloud hosting for deep learning or mining, managed database (Redis/MongoDB/MariaDB), managed hosting, managed cloud for things like Kubernetes or any other container solution.
To do so, you will surely need good experience and understanding of the hosting business along with that, you will also need planning and investment before you start selling your services to the customers. Following are certain pointers you must need to consider while drafting a business plan.
Choosing the right hosting provider
The most important factor that you must focus on is to find the right hosting provider. You may be putting all the efforts to offer the best, uninterruptable service to your customers but if the infrastructure offered by the hosting provider is not reliable, your customers will only keep suffering and will eventually blame you for the bad service. You don’t want to lose your customers just because your provider is not capable of providing seamless service and faster resolution. Please check for the following points before you choose the right hosting provider
- Strong reputation in the market
- Strong infrastructure and global presence
- Scalable hardware capability (Dedicated/Cloud)
- Applications to support reseller (Billing/Ticket management/API, etc)
- Competitive pricing
Apart from the above, you must also look at how strong your host is in providing high end technological services like
- DDoS Protection for strong defense against attacks
- Anycast routing methodology that can maximize the speed, minimize downtime and provide our customers with the highest possible SLA
- Who can provide Private Networking for free which can offer you isolation from the outside network for stronger protection against attacks
- Managed CDN (Content Delivery Network) service to reduce latency to a significant level across multiple application instances using the technique for optimizing resource utilization, maximizing throughput, reducing latency, and ensuring fault-tolerant configurations.
- Managed DNS where you can utilize authorized DNS servers hosted by a service provider to store their authoritative DNS records and enable Internet access to their website.
- Strong Backup and recovery system to protect your data from any data loss due to any sort of disaster
Hosting package that suits you
Before you choose your package, you must do your homework by studying the market, analyzing your competitors, and most importantly keeping your projections in mind. You must know how many users you are going to start with and eventually grow in the months and years to come. This will help you to choose the right package that will meet your growing requirements. Keep provision for a sudden spike in requirement from your users. You do not want to lose business because you were unable to meet the requirement. Make sure your hosting provider offers you faster delivery and is willing to upgrade your plans at a minimum additional fee.
Creating Hosting packages for clients
To define the packages for your customers, you must know what is the price a customer is willing to pay in return for the service offered. Please remember, you cannot attract customers on the basis of price only. Customers today are smart enough to understand that cheap packages do not come along with good service. Also, there are other giants in the market who can afford to offer cheaper packages always. Hence, factors such as resource allocation (disk space, bandwidth, databases etc.), the type of hardware and software instances available and quality of support should dictate the prices of your plans.
Managing your support
You will need to define a good support system that will look after the customer's queries, billing, signup, etc. WHMCS is an all-in-one hosting automation platform with client management, provisioning of services, billing, and support. It handles everything from signup to termination of customers. Its functionality is expandable with extensions, add-ons, and hooks executing third-party code on certain events. There are many customizable options within WHMCS.
It is highly recommended to get a managed service from your hosting provider so you do not have to set up a technical team at your end. All you need to do is re-direct your customer's technical query to your hosting provider and their technical the team will fix the issue for you.
Defining TOS (Terms Of Service)
This part should be pretty simple as you only need to follow the Terms of Service offered by your hosting provider. You can easily find this on your host's website. A good way to go about this to have it properly documented and to ensure it is legally sound and abided by both the parties.
Start promoting
And finally, once you are all set with your plan, you must take your business online and start promoting aggressively like any other eCommerce business. Create landing pages where you can offer customers to sign-up for a trial or offer initial discounts to allure customers. Ensure that your payment methods/gateway are in place. Be ready with a strong online promotion and marketing plan that includes a display or search ads, develop an organic content marketing plan, set up social media accounts and promote there.
We hope you find these pointers useful and may they lead you to become a successful reseller in the market. Always remember, the key to success in this business is honest support and paying attention to your customer's needs. It is very important to have your complete focus on your existing customers at the same time venture out for new customers.
