How did you get started in reselling?

G

Gil857

New member
I'm looking for some inspiration from others who have been successful in web host reselling.

Anyone care to share how they first got started? Or how they got their first client, how many clients they have now, or some successful marketing campaigns, problems overcome, etc?

Would love to hear your stories - sometimes is just helps to hear a success story to keep the hope alive :)
 
Gil, I am not running a web hosting company myself, but I had many opportunities to do so. These opportunities are the same stories as I heard it from a lot of other people. I happen to know quite a few small business owners in my area where I live and they know I am interested in this subject, so when they decide to take their business/presence online, they would always ask me for help/directions.

A good chunk of those people were ready to pay me to organize the process and pay me to host the sites (for them its just easier to do it), so if I were to operate a firm myself, I would get my first clients through direct interaction with friends and acquaintances.

I guess the best move for any web hosting reseller is to market locally. People would be more comfortable hosting with you because you are near them. A lot of times those who are not familiar with the industry choose to deal with someone from their town thinking they "host" your business here as well. Little do they know that often their websites are hosted on servers across the continent. :)

Best,
 
Advertising in the local market should be less expensive than online advertising. The "big boys" of hosting are fighting fiercely online. The local market will generally accept higher prices for smaller space and data transfer allotments. Here, many customers would not even expect 24/7 support, but online it's very important to offer it.
 
I got started when I purchased a dedicated server. A good amount of the capacity was idle, while some of it was being used for my website/personal file storage. Web hosting is fairly profitable and I've learned, as a reseller, that you tend to attract a different crowd. Typically my clients are those who have limited experience with hosting. This is good and bad. Its good because they trust me to make some of the tech decisions and manage the site. Its bad because they may inadvertently do things to damage their site--leaving me and my staff with the burden to clean it up!
 
rohitj said:
I got started when I purchased a dedicated server. A good amount of the capacity was idle, while some of it was being used for my website/personal file storage. Web hosting is fairly profitable and I've learned, as a reseller, that you tend to attract a different crowd. Typically my clients are those who have limited experience with hosting. This is good and bad. Its good because they trust me to make some of the tech decisions and manage the site. Its bad because they may inadvertently do things to damage their site--leaving me and my staff with the burden to clean it up!
Click to expand...

ya, thats the life of hosting reseller.
i still considering do or not to do. what is the profit margin look like? can share the info??
 
charlesgan said:
ya, thats the life of hosting reseller.
i still considering do or not to do. what is the profit margin look like? can share the info??
Click to expand...

That sums it up for me too - I'm still considering whether to engage in reselling or not. I already have a reseller account for my own sites and have spare space that I could resell and purchase more if necessary - I've thought about offering hosting with web design solutions locally as I do web development at my day job. It wouldn't be a conflict of interest as we do not offer web development services there - I only do development for our company's site.
 
You find a reputable provider; one without a bizarre corporate background (speaking from personal experience) ;)
 
Hello. I think that reseller hosting is the best way to start your own webhosting business. If you are going to run dedi you should be quite good in it. IMO
 
Hi, as mentioned above, the upstream provider is extremely important, you can go to the webhosting resellers review sites and use reseller hosting ratings to make your choice from. And anotherthing you can resell shared, resellers or VPS hosting, make up your mind as for this. Good luck!
 
And you may start it with your partner (I mean with a more experienced person). It may help you much.
 
Make a prospective list of your contact & target them first and focus on getting customers from the town you live or from your immediate locality.
 
I got started after a vacation and needed to pay for college :), got a server and a day later had my first customer. Sold it a few years ago, was fun but stressful sometimes. Learned so much and would have changed so much I did!
 
Hey,

Yea, that's very true. The Big guys really push and push hard. There is a couple of ways to beat them... However, don't count much on it...

If you are starting out small.. get yourself on a forum and build up customers like that and hope that one of the bigger guys will buy you out (maybe?)
 
Well i just got board of TV, and dicided to start some sort of small business:) Don't know why i went on the reseller route though? oh well.
 
I have been buying servers to host my sites and in due course of time felt that there was large chunk of space and bandwidth that was going unused. So, i thought over this and decided to become a reseller, which would atleast get me some returns for the servers and in addition get the resources consumed judiciously. Also, web hosting wasn't something i had done earlier, so this was appealing.
 
Well I shared a server with a friend, he needed someone to help him manage the support tech area. So I decided to help him out and eventually I got a reseller package on the server, since I was part of the staff. You could say I worked hard and he gave me a bonus :)

Anyways I basically hosted friends and a few friends of friends, which started me off slowly. Then I got to a point where I couldn't manage the server, because of college time. So I decided to sell it off and after that I haven't really hosted. I do have a shared hosting plan, but it's used for my own site.
 
I think that first of all better to start with a friend or a partner as well. Second: go with reliable cmpanies, providing inhouse support like hosgator.com or ************.
Third: work hard on your service promotion.
Make much money.
 
A friend of mine had a Dedicated Server for an application he was working on. All that extra space we just turned into hosting. Since then, he has sold the project he was working on so we had to drop the DS and go with a reseller.

Most of our clients are local to me even though we do try to advertise on the net. As most of us know, it is so competative out there but it is really surprising for people that are not so net savvy what they pay for hosting / domain registration.

Personally, I make more selling custom scripts than the hosting. ;)
 
To be honest, i never wanted to enter web hosting stream and i would haven't if there had not been financial crisis in my then business. I had a server for my projects and one of the projects went miserably wrong with financial strain pushng me to find ways to garner cash and web hosting was easiest venture since i already had a server with me. Initially, it was slow and required alot of effort but once word spread, clientage increased.
 
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