Nowadays many hosts are giving free license to use client billing scripts provided people take reseller hosing from them. It tempts people to get reseller from concerned host.

How many of you got influenced by such offers to get reseller from the host. I am not saying that host providing reseller is/was bad. Just checking as to how many considered such offers to ger reseller accounts?

Hi!

To answer from a Host prospective...

If you provide good quality reseller hosting and add free billing software as a value added service there shouldn't be any loss of quality of service.

It's really a win-win situation for everyone, the client is happy they save money and the host is happy because their client is happy.

Even though offering free billing software helps, its not the only thing a person looking for reseller hosting should account for when doing their search. Making sure you have support that backs up your reseller business, uptime, pricing, etc all play in effect.

Kind Regards,

Derrick

It's called a loss leader. It means that you're giving something of value for free, in exchange for the customer paying for something else.

This has been around for a very very long time, and has been for a reason...it works.

Loss leaders are usually not the only reason a person will buy of course, but it does go a long way for convincing the person that there are additional reasons to buy.

The fact is, there is only so many things you can say about web hosting, differently than another web host. Customers don't want the same old service they can get elsewhere. They want to know how choosing you as their provider will benefit them over your competition. When you throw in value added products or services, such as free software (software that will usually cost them a pretty penny), you begin to narrow the gap between you and your competitors as to why you benefit them more.

besides, a decently sized provider will pay a lot less for these licenses (the bulk discounts get quite ridiculous) than the reseller would have to pay on his own. It's the same technique used by datacenters for control panel licenses. At the end of the day, everybody wins, the hosting provider, the reseller, the software developer and indirectly, even the end user (reseller's customer).

I've never personally seen a company offer me that before. Usually I had to use my own billing script I made. I kept tracks with that and also used paypal, as a secondary way of taking care of payments. It really depends on how big your business is too. I think if a hosting company was offering me a free client billing script, I'd probably take that offer. It does have a luring effect and like Idcdc said, it works out for everyone in the end

Consider the situation where you get influenced by this offer and get hosted. Till it remains value added feature, its good but when it turns out to be more of an attempt to attratc clients sidelining services and equipment, things get terribly wrong. Now if you were to move to other host, your hands are tied down. You would now need to either purchase license for billing software or go with host offering free license for same billing software.
This doesn't go very well IMHO. Free billing script is an asset if host is good but becomes a liability or problem if you get hosted with any tom, dick, harry.