Reseller web hosting allows you to sell web hosting to others for a profit. With a reseller web hosting account, you can easily create your hosting brand and offer full-featured hosting to third-party companies and individuals with websites. Reseller hosting is a great opportunity to start your own hosting business or expand your web-related services. Read on to learn more about the pros and cons of reseller web hosting and determine if this special type of hosting is right for you.
Reseller Web Hosting Pricing
Reseller web hosting typically costs more than traditional shared web hosting packages, making sense, given the increase in the service’s resources. With reseller hosting, you can set up websites, often on a network of servers with unlimited space and a vast amount of resources. Reseller web hosting allows you to sign up for other websites and companies under your website hosting brand without maintaining or installing any network hardware. You can also bypass other expenses involved in running your own web hosting company, such as utility bills, and drive replacement costs with a reseller account.
Many reseller web hosting providers charge between $20 and $100 monthly for reseller accounts. This price can vary based on what kind of resources are offered and the overall size, complexity, and speed of the network you are utilizing. This can be seen as a ‘con’ if you don’t intend to use the reseller account by signing up other website owners because traditional shared hosting can be purchased for much less. If you find hosting clients, then this pricing structure is a strong ‘pro’ since you can easily recover your investment and turn a profit with even a handful of clients.
Branding with Reseller Web Hosting
One of the biggest pros to reseller website hosting is the opportunity they provide you to further your company’s branding. As a web designer, developer, website administrator, or owner of any web-related venture, you can gain customer confidence and impress your clients by offering a branded hosting solution. Not all reseller web hosting providers have a system in place for you to re-brand your hosting services, but many do.
Look for a reseller host that offers white-page services so that you can customize the hosting page logos. Some reseller server space providers even allow you to customize the nameservers, meaning your customers will host their website at a web server with a DNS address that you own.
Other Cons of Using Reseller Website Hosting
If you don’t want to resell web hosting, then the cost of a reseller account may be a ‘con’ for the system from your perspective. This is also true if you’re just starting in the website-creation or web-hosting world and haven’t learned enough about hosting to make an effective sales pitch or marketing plan for your reseller account.
An easy remedy for this potential ‘con’ is to take a few minutes to learn how web hosting works. Once you’ve read up enough to explain it to your clients, you will have the confidence and understanding necessary to turn this simple system into a profitable business.
Another potential con of reseller website hosting is that it can add complexity to your hosting and website business. You must keep up with additional billing processes to collect money from your hosting clients. Some hosts make this easy for you by allowing in-house, re-brandable billing. Other hosts leave it up to you to send invoices to your customers. Consider packaging the hosting expense with another service you provide if your host doesn’t have a billing solution for your clients to create a simpler process for everyone.
Additional Pros of Reseller Website Hosting
Aside from the potential to turn a profit and empower your branding, there are a few more benefits of having a reseller account. Most reseller accounts offer an impressive amount of resources, such as unlimited disc space and multiple cPanel installations. If you end up owning more than one website, you can even utilize these resources on your own if you don’t find clients right away.
Having multiple cPanel installations is incredibly useful as you can allow other people to log in to your host and work on websites without affecting your cPanel settings. This is a good measure if you have or intend to have multiple designers, authors, writers, developers, or other employees joining you on your website. This is also a great way to keep multiple websites separate, whether administrated by the same or multiple people.
Getting a reseller web hosting account is an important step in expanding your brand and services. However, there are some drawbacks to having reseller web hosting, particularly if you don’t have a solid plan to use it. Reseller accounts tend to cost twice as much as shared hosting accounts, so the pricing may not be right for you if you’re not interested in finding hosting clients.
