Becoming a Hosting and Domains reseller

I am getting bored.

I want to start some new business on the net.

I am planning to get reseller account and promote hosting and domains. How profitable is this business. Can I succeed?

I have no ideas on how to promote and advertise. But I am ready to learn.

 

You can make money in the hosting business, but that is a very competitive industry - I'm not sure it would be the best industry for a novice.

 

my friend does it, and it's a severe pain in the ass. You'll be handing customer service problems 24/7, you must be there to restart services for customers, be on AIM all day long, close accounts of people who didn't pay, etc.

IMO it's more work than what it's worth.

 

If you know and understand the industry you should have no problem getting ahead

But because its so competitive, expect to spend a lot of money on advertising, and expect to lose money for a couple of months

 

The hosting business is the most crawded industry ...

So if you don't have a LOT LOT LOT of money to invest

 

yep it gets boring after a while.. try getting into development and coding should work well..

 

THe only people who actually make reasonable profit are ones with a reputation or lots of money to spend on adwords. Top players spend something like $5,000 - $10,000 per day on adwords alone!

If you want to start as a reseller you will most probably want to pick up customers from forums rather than ppc campaigns and search engines and those people will want to look at your history, if you are a new host its unlikely they will chose you over someone who has been hosting for over 3-4 years even if it means they have to pay more!

 

I am trying to concentrate on smaller buyers. Like 10MB storage. And $10 fee for 1 yr! Howz that?

 

Well, small customers looking for budget plans are usually the ones which would take up the most of your support time. They are usually clueless about everything and will bother you day and night and if you do not make it your pleasure to serve them on hands and knees, they would be the first to vocally black name your business.

Remember that when you offer web hosting services, although the profit margin is small, you are holding the fate of many people's livelihood in your hands. You need to ensure uptime and you also need to know more than your customers in order to troubleshoot the problem. They will blame you for every downtime and all that whenever possible.

You definitely will not have any time to be bored after that .

A reseller account although apt, does not leave you with much control as most of the time, you are dependent on your web host for uptime, server level support and backups. But the benefit is that it is usually low cost and frees you from having to managed your own server.

However, if you get your own dedicated server or even a VPS, it gives you more legroom to be competitive as you can set up the server as you like but of course, it means more cost and also the added task of managing and administering your server.

It is a difficult market to enter but if you are willing to give up your personal time and are willing to invest heavily in advertising and support, it can be profitable.

It is something you do for the long term and not something you can brush off when times are bad.

 

Looks like its not a very lucrative one where anyone can jump in easily.

Is it possible to do this thing with "No customer support"?

Well, no jokes, affordable hosting means little/no support!

 

"No customer support"

If you wrote the above words any where on your site, you won't be able to get a single customer and as eddy mentioned, the customers looking for small space and storage are totally noob, they will eat up your time as well as brain. So I will recommend you not to get into this business.

PS: Are you from PK?

 

Development can be way more interesting than offering hosting services and support, agreed.

 

ok, i quit this business. there are also some nice offline business oppurtunities in India and i will concentrate on that.

Designcode, i think i answered ur Q also

 

Not sure about others, personally I did not mean to discourage you.
If you still believe hosting business is something you'd feel confortable doing, then be it. I always do what I love to.

If you decide to return to the idea, I've got a 6 letter .COM related domain to sell that contains "host" in it. I bought it when I was excided about starting a hosting company myself which never happened since I realised I did not have enough time for it.

Good luck.

 

Hi Clive, I may be interested to buy that domain. PM me details plz

 

NO to "No support"

If you cant support, better do something else.

 

I have a small hosting company, about 60 customers, although I bought the company only a couple of months ago. It does require time, I am contacted by customers regularly but usually the problems are easy enough to fix. But I'm considering selling as I don't really have the time for it, what with other projects needing my time and the like.

 

if you want to be a host - become a developer and host your clients' sites.

this way customer support can be charged for because it will always mean you adding a little extra to their web site.

you also get paid for the development AND maintanence of the website - its a good idea to offer development relatively cheap but have an above average hosting bill
... this will encourage people to have you build the site but in the long run wil benefit you a lot more than charging a lot for your design services - afterall, who wants to go through the hassle of switching hosts?

 

I think just the support issue will break you into tears. I know that cuz I, for one, goes to my host for lots of support and sometimes I think they must be thinking what stupid questions I'm asking..