Is it easy to Resell Web Hosting?
I always think that Web Hosting is one of the most difficult services to sell, a heavily saturated market, low cost colocation with great connectivity, and also hardware than can be picked up second hand for next to nothing from the likes of eBay! Arguably you could run a Web Hosting company from your garage (we don’t!). Now-a-days, since I first started using Web Hosting, hardware has came along way and machines can cope with vast websites rather than the standalone, unless you’re hosting a phenomenal platform of course! The average personal, small and medium website can sit on Web Hosting, or even a Virtual Server – both do not provide a high cost.
But, the biggest question we are always asked is, is it easy to make money from our Reseller Hosting packages?
The simple answer is yes, but why you ask? Simple. There are 3 reasons –
- Price – our Central London based Reseller Hosting costs as little as £10 per month inclusive of VAT @ 20%. This is broken down to £2.50 a week, 33p a day, 1p an hour, or 0.002p per minute to run your website, and even your friend’s, and customer’s websites.
- Billing – a lot of people complain that they have to pay for billing software such as ClientExec and WHMCS. To build a house you need to start at the foundations, it’s the same for a hobby which you may turn into a business. BoxBilling, is a free, and fantastic Online Billing System that can help you get started, some of our customers have migrated their customers from other billing systems, to BoxBilling.
- Network – The best way to sell is to your friends, and they sell to their friends. This slowly builds up a network style of marketing which is a great way to fund a hobby or get your business off the ground. If you have 4 friends, who all want to host their own website, with SiteBuilder Software, Softaculous Easy-Install with over 300+ popular pieces of software, you can help subsidies your hobby by charging them a little bit of money you fund your hosting. The magic goes from there.
So, where is the proof?
The proof is always in the pudding. We are still here doing it with minimum emphasis on marketing spend, and more orientated around providing a great service to the customers we have. A great deal of our clients use our Reseller Hosting services to fuel their website projects, but their own web solutions company, and even sell web hosting as an added extra for their game servers. Testimonials, and positive feedback (and negative of course) fuels the way we work, and helps us to create an awesome service.
Do I need WHMCS to sell Web Hosting?
Free online billing software is available on the market but the common phrase is you pay for what you get, which when you pay nothing, could all of a sudden become unsupported or turned into a premium model whereby licenses are required. The good thing about starting with a system like WHMCS is that you lower the risk as it is such a widely supported company with thousands of licenses in use, providing a strong and secure product. One problem that is worth noting for future when you’re looking ahead is, if you are even thinking about changing billing systems in future – it is much less hassle to foot the cost in the first instance rather than spend a significant amount of time transferring and re-establishing users from system to system. Billing Systems such as ClientExec & WHMCS tend to have migration scripts and support available.
Would you still be providing Web Hosting Services & Reseller Hosting Services based on what you now know?
The Web Hosting industry is tough, but without a challenge what would be the point? There are events all throughout the year that we are always invited to, this brings a great group of people together as well as lets you ask the questions to the big players such as cPanel, CloudFlare, OnApp, and other huge hosting companies.
James Ensor
