You have to see your hosting reselling as a business, if you wish to succeed in the long run. And one of the first things a business needs is a name for the business. Don’t rush this decision, your name is going to be with you for as long as your business goes on, and it determines, to some extent, how your clients view your business. Calling your business “Mike’s Hosting” won’t sound very professional (though if your hi school mates are your target audience, this may actually work 
).
We found a nice article for you about how to choose a name for your webhosting reseller company -
Choosing a Name for Your Business
Follow the advice given there! you won’t regret it!
Where to find your web hosting clients is the big question. Setting up a reseller’s hosting company, is fairly easy. Coming up with the customers is the hard part.
Sources for potential customers -
1. Search engines traffic to your site (what do you mean you don’t have a site??? you have to have a site for you hosting company!)
2. Online advertising campaigns by either buying banner space on websites, or paying Yahoo or Google to carry your text ads.
3. Offline advertising in newspapers or other publications.
4. Word of mouth - get the word through friends, family, online acquaintences and anywhere you can, that you are in the hosting business.
Be creative and think outside the box. How about letting the people in your mailing group or favorite forums know about your hosting? Or maybe target your local community and post your printouts in the local community center or your church? Clients are everywhere, get them to know you!
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.
The web hosting market is comprised of several leagues of players. You have the data centers and the huge suppliers of bandwidth and hosting space. Then you have the actual hosting companies, that run sets of servers in their server racks and sell it to individuals or companies. And finally, you have the resellers, smaller hosting providers that have their accounts based off an actual host.
Before you get into this market, you must realize just how crowded it is. The fact that anyone can put in as little as $5 for a reseller account and start their own hosting scheme means that many people are actually doing that. The market is crowded, and many say it’s oversaturated even.
You may think it’s easy to join the hosting game, but you will soon find out that unless you come up with some new marketing ploys and ideas, you may not be able to find customers, or to retain them. For every person posting on a webmasters forum that they are looking for hosting, there are 10 posting back and offering their service. What’s more, competition means that prices go down, and your profit margin decreases… We’re not trying to deter you from becoming a web hosting reseller. On the contrary, this blog is here to help you with your efforts. All we ask is that you be realistic. This is hard work, and you may have to work for months on to acquire a solid base of clients before you get to see the money rolling in.
We’ll talk tomorrow about just how much money can be rolled in from this venture. In theory, it can be quite a lot, but just remember that not everyone will get a share of the hosting budget cake - it takes work to generate revenue.
Welcome to our new Hosting Resellers blog, where we will bring you news and tidbits about hosting in general and reseller hosting in particular. This blog is mainly for people who are hosting resellers, or who plan on starting their own web hosting reseller business.
Reselling hosting space can be a great way to set up your own home business, without making any big investments. Basic knowledge of hosting is preferable, but with today’s hosting management systems such as WHM and Cpanel, you don’t have to be a hosting geek to offer your own web hosting service, as a reseller for a large host.
As a reseller you don’t have to look after the servers yourself. The technical aspects of making sure everything is up and running are somebody else’s headache. What you do need to care about are your customers. Fortunately, if you work with a reliable host, that offers good uptime and good tech support, chances are you won’t have to deal with your clients very often. With nine out of ten clients, your job will probably be to bring them to your company and sell them the hosting in the first place, then setup their account, then all you need to do is collect the payments 