Before you set up on your new journey as a reseller, we hope you have a business plan in hand. Even if you’re just doing this small time, you need to try and see if and how you can make money here. As a reseller, you will be pricing your own hosting packages, and you can’t price them, unless you have a proper business plan.
Don’t be intimidated. A business plan doesn’ t mean weeks of work. Even a few hours of thought and then sketching something on a clean sheet of paper can be your business plan. As long as you have one…
Let’s see what the business model of a web hosting reseller looks like. For the purpose of this post, we’ll focus on pricing issues.
First you need your hosting space, so you can sell it. Practically every major hosting company offers some sort of a reseller plan. Browse around, check the various plans and find one that offers you a good amount of hosting space and bandwidth for a reasonable price.
We recommend Apollo Hosting’s reseller plan. They offer resellers who want to customize their own plans, 1500MB of space and 15GB of transfer at just under $50 (as of writing this post).
These 15GB of disk space need to be broken into packages or accounts that you will be selling to your clients. How large the packages is something you’ll have to decide upon. Here are a few considerations -
Are you going to offer just one package? Or are you going to be offering several options to prospective clients?
Who are your prospective clients and what kind of sites will they be hosting? are they business owners in your locality, or are they webmasters, who might be requiring special features on your server?
Are you going to oversell? As a guideline, unless you are pretty sure that your clients won’t be using much disk space or bandwidth, do not oversell.
A possible conclusion here would be to target non-geeks as your prospective customers, and offer only packages of 100 MB of disk space and 1 GB of bandwidth a month. These would more than enough for a small business that only wants to have an online calling card.
Now, your 1500MB of disk space can be divided into 15 hosting packages for you to sell. If you charge as little as $10 per each account, you will be making $150 in revenue, and $100 in profit. You can now tweak your prices, charge more to make more, or less to attract your customers faster.