Are you a web designer who would like to make extra money, or include hosting with your design services? Are you tech savvy and want to provide hosting services on a small scale ? Do you know of contacts who need to have reliable hosting solutions ? These are just a few reason on why you would want to become a reseller.

Reselling is the business of having a hosting account and then reselling a portion of your resources to a customer. A reseller program usually includes an interface to create accounts, setup billing, suspend, allocate and terminate services. You can choose to be a reseller for the windows, linux or even gaming platforms. Your reseller account could be on a shared reseller server where you share resources with other resellers and their customers. You can also maintain a reseller account on a virtual private server known as a VPS server and later as your business grows move your accounts to a dedicated server.

Your ROI for being a reseller is an important fact when deciding if you want to be a reseller. Since you are going to able to offer a package with less features than most major competitors, you would need to stay under the market cost of other hosting plans. You can improve the bottom line by bundling your services with other services you offer such as web design or consulting. You might also want to think of partners that has the same type of customers as you do and work out an agreement to recommend your services to their customers and vice versa, this is known as vertical marketing. Vertical marketing is when you have a partner with the same types of customers, when one of the partners gets a customer it potentially can benefit both partners. You have the same types of customers but you don’t compete to gain those customers. Any new customers are exposed to both partners products.

Advertising and affiliate programs will increase how much money you pay out to get new customers. Programs such as commission junction can give you the exposure to the affiliate market you need. People recommend your service to their customer, the customer signs up for a sale and then the affiliate gets paid a commission.

One downside of being a reseller is that you are on call day and night. When something goes wrong, or your customer has a technical issue you have to call the hosting company for the resolution. You support your customer, the hosting company supports you. Most reseller systems include panel and fantastico, through this you can install one of a few free ticket systems. This will help you keep track of support issues and requests.

Charging customers on a regular basis such as monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual is called renewals. This helps determine the stability of your reseller brand. Customers who leave you instead of renewing is called churn. Not everyone needs or wants to renew their account. Make sure you have a clear cancellation policy that you process in a timely fashion.

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