Besides hosting your website or applications, there are numerous other ways how you can benefit from a dedicated server host. One of them is reseller hosting, which means creating hosting based on server capacities leased from different hosting providers. What is reseller hosting, why might you be interested in engaging in such activity, and how to start reseller hosting?
What is reseller hosting and why should you start reselling hosting?
Reseller hosting basically means that you resell the capacities you rent from hosting and create your own hosting services.
Reselling hosting might be a great idea if you are interested in business development, particularly in web hosting, but you don’t have yet the financial resources to start such a business from scratch, buy a whole lot of hardware, rent space in data centers, organe the maintenance, etc. Let’s have a more detailed look at why reseller hosting might be at least an interesting business idea.
Creating and testing a new brand
As mentioned, reseller hosting is a good idea to receive a head start for your digital business while not having sufficient capital resources to become a “full-scale” hosting provider. Create a new brand, organize it as you see fit, and see, how it will work out. In this regard reselling hosting can also be considered as a kind of sandbox, so you can test and try out your business idea without taking too high risks and responsibilities.
Adding new features
If want to ask, why become a new hosting provider, if there is already one you rent the capacities from, the answer is that you can create a new service according to your own business view. An existing hosting provider has already an established strategy and approach, which does work but it doesn’t mean that this is the only way. Reselling hosting, you can feel free to try out new ways, for instance, adding new services, experimenting with marketing strategies, with pricing policy, with the website, etc.
Adding new locations
If you are an established, but growing hosting provider, reselling hosting can be a good way to easily add new locations without too much hustle, thus expanding your geographical scope, also testing a new location and seeing if it is worth adding.
Wholesale prices
Hosting providers often offer servers on more affordable conditions for resellers, so you shouldn’t be scared off by their price tags for regular customers.
Steps on starting to
Find a hosting provider and purchase the capacities
To start reselling hosting, you first and foremost need to find a provider whose hosting you can resell. You can look for the providers who offer their hosting for resellers explicitly. Otherwise, you can ask the provider whose offers have caught your attention about such a possibility.
Make sure to inform yourself about the specificities of reseller hosting of your provider, the usage conditions, what is allowed and what is not, if there are discounts for reselling hosting, etc.
Purchase the amount of capacities necessary for the realization of your reseller hosting project and move on.
Consider technical realization
Consider, what you are going to deploy from the technical point of view. In particular, what types of hosting you are going to offer?
Besides dedicated servers, you can also deploy shared hosting, virtual private hosting, and even cloud hosting. Consider these options and consider how you are going to do this from the technical point of view. For example, if you are going to start VPS hosting, you first need to choose the type of virtualization it will be based on, as different types of virtualization and different virtualization solutions offer different benefits to the host and to its customers.
Also, it’s important to consider, which types of hardware you are going to offer, which you can later underline when creating your offers.
Develop your business model
Develop, what your offers are going to look like. Come up with different hosting plan bundles, with different numbers of resources and other features with an eye on satisfying the needs of various types of customers, with budget-friendly plans for small website owners as well as with plans for big projects.
Create and launch a website
Develop a website for your hosting with an eye on your vision of hosting business. This can be a costly and long process, but if approached wisely, your website will have a dramatic effect on the success of your web hosting project.
To sum up
Reselling hosting means buying hosting capacities from one host hosting provider and selling them under your own hosting brand. In the article above we’ve covered the reasons, why this can be a good business idea as well as the basic steps on how to approach it and start reselling hosting easily. We hope that this article has provided you with meaningful insights and wish you good luck!