One of the problems with reselling web hosting, as in any other business, is the competition. There are a lot of web hosts out there, all competing for customers and all trying to offer the best deals.

How can you, with your new reseller hosting website, hope to compete against the established web hosting companies.

Well, there are a number of things that are in your favour.

Firstly, web hosting is an expanding market, so although there are a lot of competitors, there’s plenty of room for you to set up your reseller hosting business.

Secondly, the big web hosting companies need to concentrate on the general market.

This means that, as in other internet based businesses, concentrating on niche markets can be more profitable, especially if you choose a niche that other people aren’t exploiting.
You can differentiate yourself from all the other web hosting companies out there by offering a different combination of features, or maybe even just by emphasizing different features that might appeal to a particular niche.

For instance, maybe you could concentrate on hosting for real estate sites. Now most cPanel hosting with Fantastico has Open-Realty available for installing. Yet I don’t know of anybody who makes that a selling point for their web hosting.

Of course, you’re not just limited to what comes with your reseller package.

By concentrating on a niche market, you can become recognised as an expert in the field, and benefit from recommendations from existing clients in that niche. It also enables you to concentrate your advertising and marketing efforts into an area where there may be little or no competition.

There are vertical niches i.e. particular market sectors, such as doctors, architects, auto spares, cycle shops, etc, and horizontal niches, such as local small businesses etc, so you shouldn’t have difficulty finding a niche that you can identify with and become a trusted partner in.

The next question is - when am I going take my own advice and which niche am I going to choose for my web hosting business…hmmm.

Host Gator has made Soholaunch website builder for businesses available as part of its hosting packages.

HostGator resellers can immediately offer all end users unlimited free use of Soholaunch Website Builder for Business. The software features a Quick Start Site Building Wizard, ”Drag and Drop” page editing, and photo albums. The software comes with a good choice of over 150 templates in 19 categories to get the customer started, with the ability to upload custom templates. Pages can be created and edited easily within the software.

Customers can also upgrade their free license to include optional advanced features such as a multi-currency shopping cart, database table manager, event calendar system, eNewsletter system, secure user management, site backup/restore, and a blog manager.

How I Set up my Web Hosting Store

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, there’s an option if you don’t have much cash to put into starting a reseller hosting business - get a free hosting reseller account.

If you want to get started straight away, you can get one from Resellers Panel

Signing up for an account

I’ve signed up for an account myself, and its a pretty painless process. No setup fees or deposits are required to start using the reseller hosting solution. But you can, if you want to, order a domain name for your new web hosting site at the same time. This is the option I took, and paid $8 to register the domain name www.ddwebsitehosting.com.

Remember - the domain name is optional - you can start straight away without it. If you don’t have your own domain name, your website will be given an URL on their domain automatically. You can also use an existing domain name if you already have one, you just need to change its nameservers to point to your new store and fill in the appropriate boxes on the setup form.

After the signup you will be provided with a web address that you can start using immediately. You can build your reseller website quickly using the control panel menu.

Customize your Store

You’ve already given your store a name, but now you’ll want to customize it. The first thing to do is choose a template for your new web hosting site. Resellers Panel offer you a choice of 16 templates - choose one you like as the basis for your site. I went with the recommended template (the newest one).

But you’re not finished there - you can upload a header graphic with your own logo, edit the metatags, add up to 3 link buttons (to you other websites?) and edit the header and footer (you don’t need to do it all at once - you can go back to it later).

Of course, much of the look and feel of your site will remain the same as the template you’ve chosen. If you have more knowledge of HTML, Javascript and IFRAMES, you have the option to design your own web hosting site, using Resellers Panels remote forms or their Resellers API. Remember that Resellers Panel will still handle all the support and billing details, leaving you free to get on with promoting your business

For now, I’ve stuck with the standard hosted option; at a later date I’ll investigate the more advanced options and let you know how I get on.

Set up Hosting Plans and Prices

After setting up your store, the next thing is to create your hosting packages and prices. Again - you don’t need to - you can start immediately with just the two included web hosting packages, the Business Package and the Corporate Package, which are both good value.

Assuming you keep the two included packages, this leaves you the possibility of creating up to 18 more hosting packages using the Liquid Plan Builder. The Liquid Plan builder is a great tool that calculates the wholesale price for you in real time as you decide on options for your plan, so you can easily try out different options and see how they affect the price.

Creating hosting plans is my only real niggle with the account - the two standard packages are such good value, that its hard to come up with other plans that come close. I tried fitting another plan in between the two (the Duo Plan if you look at my store) that offered people who need to host 2 websites an option between the single domain Business plan and the 10 domain Corporate

Unfortunately, the price worked out almost as much as the Corporate, and I would make less profit on it than either of the other two plans, so I had to juggle the prices of the other two plans about, and reduce the webspace allowance on my Duo Plan to get a reasonable selling price differential between the plans.

You can of course, create plans above the existing plans - you really have no limit on the webspace you can offer, because you haven’t bought a set amount of webspace to divide up, as you do with normal reseller accounts.

OK thats it for now - you can check out the site at www.ddwebsitehosting.com and keep an eye on the progress as I add more plans, and eventually investigate the more advanced features.

Get started with your own web hosting business - try out Resellers Panel now - there’s no cost and no risk!

Technorati Tags: reseller, free hosting reseller account, hosting packages, web hosting

For those new to reseller hosting, overselling is the practice of selling more webspace/bandwidth than you’ve got, in the hope that none of your customers will ever use anything like their full allocation anyway. The practice is common, not only in web hosting, but also in other industries - but is it an acceptable practice or a ripoff for customers?

Advantages of overselling web hosting
You might think that there are only advantages for the web host or hosting reseller, but actually there are advantages for the customer too.

Let us say you’re starting out in reseller hosting with a 5Gb webspace/50Gb bandwidth hosting package and you want to entice your customers with a web hosting starter package that offers them 500Mb storage and 5Gb bandwith allocation. That means after you’ve signed up 10 customers, you’ve run out of space and bandwidth - time to upgrade to a bigger package?

Well, maybe, maybe not. Take a look at the actual resources being used by your customers. Chances are none of them are using anything like their allocation of disc space or bandwidth. Perhaps quite a few of them are websites belonging to small businesses, either a limited number of static html pages, or maybe a small ecommerce site selling a few dozen products.

You know and I know that such a site does not usually need 500Mb webspace. One of my web design (not hosting) clients runs a successful online store selling their own brand of equine products (about 30 products). Disc space used is about 15Mb out of an allocation of 500Mb.

So - if you’ve reached the theoretical limit of what you can sell, but in actual fact you’re nowhere near that limit, you can continue to sell more hosting packages - and the clear advantage to you is that you make more money without it costing you more for hosting.

What about the advantage for the customer? Well, thats easy - if overselling were not a standard practice throughout the industry, web hosting prices would invariably be higher.

Disadvantages of overselling web hosting
There are two main disadvantages to overselling. Firstly, of course, all of your customers could start using up all of their allocation, leaving you unable to supply the service that you’ve sold. In practice, this is unlikely to happen, any build up would happen over a period of time and you should be able to spot it and make plans. As a reseller, you will be in the position of being able to upgrade your reseller plan to cope with it.

The second disadvantage is the resource usage of the processor. The processing power of the processor is the main limit to how many websites a particular server can host. Too many websites and the server will get overloaded and performance will become unacceptable. Again, this is largely dependant on the type of sites hosted - sites running lots of scripts/busy forums etc. will have more resource usage than mom & pop business sites.

Should you oversell or not?
While there are people who think that overselling is evil, the majority of web hosting resellers will say that they need to oversell to make a profit. There are many reseller accounts that specifically advertise that overselling is allowed - it’s sold as a positive benefit of their package. There are others (not so many!) that proudly proclaim that they do not allow overselling.

My view is that overselling is fine, if the situation allows it. Only you will know that - it will depend on the type of sites you are hosting and the resource usage. And of course, if one or more of your customers does start to use their entire allocation, you must have a plan in place to be able to supply them with it. As long as you not overload the capabilities of the processor, then there should be no problem.

Some people say overselling is immoral because you are selling more than you have got. That really isn’t the case. In the example above, if you’ve sold 10 packages and you find you’ve still got half your disc space/bandwidth unused, then you would not be selling more than you’ve got.

In fact if you are selling someone a 500Mb plan, you are selling them the ability to use 500Mb storage, you are not selling them a particular 500Mb chunk. As long as they can use that much when they want it, by upgrading if necessary. then its OK.

Technorati Tags: web+hosting, reseller+hosting, overselling, hosting, webspace, bandwidth

If you are looking for reseller hosting so you can host multiple domains, you’ve got a wide choice, not just of web hosting companies, but also the type of web hosting package you go for.

Many people choose a reseller hosting package just in order to host several (or many!) of their own domains. In the past, this was the only option when you wanted to host many domains under one account, rather than buy seperate hosting for each of your own websites.

Now, however, many web hosts offer multi-domain hosting as well as reseller hosting

Difference between Reseller Hosting and Multi-domain hosting

There are two main differences between reseller hosting and multi-domain hosting

The first is in the administration of the domains. With reseller hosting, you have a web hosting manager to add and manage domains, set disc space and quotas for each domain, etc. Each domain then has its own control panel for administration of the domain - setting up of email accounts, ftp, webmail, installing scripts and programs, checking visitor statistics etc. Typically you have a seperate login to the control panel for each domain, although the “master” account may be able to log in to any of them.

With a multi-domain account, you typically do not have a web hosting manager. You only have one control panel (for the “master” domain) and all administration is carried out from here. When you add a new domain to your account, it is simply created in a sub-domain and the domain name is pointed to that subdomain. Similarly, all the administration for every website you have is carried out from the one control panel. For instance, if you have Fantastico on your hosting account, and you want to install, say, Wordpress, you click to install it and you can then browse to the domain you want it installed on.

Clearly, this is no good if you have a number of customers who each need to be able to use there own control panels; but if all the websites you are hosting are your own, it can be easier to administer them all from a single control panel

Which brings us to the second important difference between a reseller package and a multi-domain account - the price. Multi-domain accounts are invariably cheaper because you don’t have the complication of seperate control panels and a seperate hosting manager.

For instance Hostgator offer an unlimited domain 5Gb account for $9.95/month (this website is hosted with them using this package and I thoroughly recommend it). If you want the reseller account with 5Gb webspace, it is $24.95/month.

So, if all the sites you want to host are your own, a multi-domain account may be a better bet for you. But what if you expand and want to start hosting other peoples sites? Well - there’s nothing stopping you from upgrading, or having a reseller account as well!