You might have been advised by many people to start reseller hosting as a part-time or a full-time business. Certainly, it's among the lucrative ideas where you can generate income online without establishing the complete infrastructure!
But, the question is how to start a reseller hosting business?
At first sight, it might seem a tough call but it really isn’t difficult. You just need to follow the right steps. Want to know how to get started?
Continue reading and learn how to kick off your own start up in just 6 steps…
6 Steps to Starting a Successful Reseller Hosting Business
A reseller host is basically a middle man who sells hosting services to the end-users by renting servers from a web hosting company.
To get started, you simply need to grab the basic technical understanding of web hosting and follow the startup-guide given below. Here is how you can start reseller hosting in just 6 steps:
- Create Your Business Plan
- Discover Your Target Audience
- Find the Best Web Hosting Company
- Get a User-friendly Website
- Design Your Packages and Set Price
- Market Your Brand and Services
1. Create Your Business Plan
Start your business with a plan. It’s just like a roadmap that helps you structure, run and boost your business. There’re no hard and fast rules to creating a plan. What matters is that it should properly define your business needs and requirements.
Now, let’s talk about how you can come up with a perfect business plan. Here’re some tips for you:
- Create a descriptive executive summary
- Identify the services you want to sell i.e., VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting, etc.
- Design your sales plan, marketing strategies and matrices for success
- Create a detailed summary of your company and management
- Set your future requirements and expectations for growth
- Understand your market problems and find solutions
- Conduct a competitor analysis to learn how your target market is solving your audience’s problems
- Create your budget and divide spending into different sections i.e., marketing, website development, etc.
- Get feedback and test different components of your business plan
Whether you want to run a reseller hosting in Pakistan or any corner of the world, you need to design a clear business plan. Just to make sure your business keeps on heading in the right direction!
2. Discover Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience is a crucial aspect of your business plan. This enables you to pinpoint potential customers and generate valuable leads without resorting to substantial expenditures.
To discover your audience, you need to answer questions like, whom do you want to resell web hosting to? What is their age group and gender? Where do they live? What are their jobs? Etc.
Here is how you can discover your target audience:
Once you’ve identified this, you can easily select appropriate reseller hosting plans that meet your target audience’s requirements. For instance, if you want to resell hosting to the new e-commerce websites, then you can choose shared hosting plans because the starters don’t require a lot of space.
Operating a reseller hosting enterprise without pinpointing your target demographic is like squandering your resources recklessly! You'll expend both funds and time on the incorrect audience, disinterested in your products. Consequently, you'll encounter diminished conversion rates and potentially no sales.
3. Find the Best Web Hosting Company
This step is the core of your entire business setup!
As a reseller, your services are directly administered by your chosen host. Hence, find a reliable company that stays with you throughout your journey and offers secure servers to your customers.
You get this step wrong, and your reseller business would fail miserably!
Types of servers, 99.9% uptime consistency, software application, and customer support are some major aspects you should keep in front of your mind while choosing a web host. These are just basics, here’re some more things you would want to consider:
- Easy website or cPanel migration
- Top-notch drives
- Regular and automatic backups
- Easy email configurations
- White labeling services
- cPanel licenses
- Free WHMCS installations and dedicated IP address
- Custom name servers etc.
Don’t you think that investing in a web host enriched with these enormous features is worth it?
Choosing the most affordable hosting provider solely to cut costs won't suffice. Doing so means grappling with server management intricacies instead of prioritizing customer needs. The consequence? Potential loss of customers and declining profits!
Sure enough, you don’t want this nightmare to become a reality. So, better get your hands on the best web hosting company! Because your hosting reseller business really depends upon it!
4. Get a User-Friendly Website
In this era where technology is elevating at an unpredictable rate, having a website for your hosting reseller business sounds mandatory. Why? Because, people usually use search engines to find products and services.
By investing in website development, you can easily appear in front of your audience whenever they search for your niche’s services. Thus, get a user-friendly site that can load at a blazing-fast speed on both mobiles and desktops.
Consider catchy web layouts that can potentially attract customers. Don’t forget to add killer CTAs, search bars, shopping carts, and other important sections. These components would enhance users’ experience and drive them towards a purchase decision.
To get this straight, have a look at the image below and see what kind of visual elements receive more prominence:
Once you’ve launched your website, start working on SEO optimization to boost your site’s ranking. Post-key-word rich content, generate back linking, and add heavy-hitting titles.
With a perfect SEO-optimized website, your reseller hosting business can easily stand on the internet. Bonus point? Your profits would rise incredibly!
5. Design Your Packages and Set Prices
Now, it’s time to set your hosting packages.
While designing your business plan, you might have decided which hosting services you want to resell. In this step, you need to organize them and set the price for each package.
Here is an example that depicts how your packages should look like:
As you can see that, different services other than hosting are also added in each package i.e., SSL certificate, domain name, 1 click install free application, etc. These add-ons are important to reinforce your user’s purchase decision. Simply offering a few web hosting servers might not bring your more customers because people usually prioritize all-in-packages.
And, what about pricing? It is highly advised to conduct a competitor’s analysis and then set standard prices in an affordable range. Don’t shy away to offer sales and free add-ons. Remember, you’re a starter and to win your customer’s attention you need to utilize such techniques.
Once you’ve established strong roots in the market, you can increase your prices anytime in the future.
6. Market Your Brand and Services
Finally, you’ve reached the last step of this guide, marketing!
Promoting your services is one of the crucial steps to discovering new customers. How can your users buy your reseller hosting plans if you don’t appear in front of them?
Thus, utilize the power of digital marketing to help your business receive more attention. With this you can enjoy more future leads, excellent profits, top ranking on search results, brand awareness and much more
Here’re different types of marketing you can use to promote your brand and services:
- Content marketing (blog posts, videos, e-books, podcasts, etc.)
- SEO optimization (on and off-page SEO)
- Social media marketing (YouTube account, Facebook pages, etc.)
- Google AdWords/ Pay Per Click (PPC) ads
- Influencer and e-mail marketing, etc.
Investing in all the types at once might turn out to be a huge hassle. Hence, try to be specific and figure out which type can help you reach your target audience. For example, if you want to resell hosting to young bloggers, then invest in social media sites i.e., Facebook, Instagram, etc. And, for the users who are frequently using Google, you can utilize SEO-optimization or content marketing.
And, that’s it!
Ready to start a hosting reseller business?
With this ultimate guide, anyone can set up a reseller hosting business with much less frustration. Don’t forget, having success as a reseller begins with hiring the best host. So, better not to mess up with your future and partner up with the best web hosting company that would help you take your profits up to a notch!
