How to be a successful hosting reseller? The short answer – you’d need to choose the right hosting provider, specialize in a niche or industry, offer top-notch support to your customers, market your services, and automate repetitive tasks so you can scale your revenue.

But there are already hundreds of hosting resellers out there – some even easy to confuse with full-fledged providers – so how do you run a successful hosting reseller business? In the rest of this piece, we’ll tell you exactly how.

Why is a Reseller Hosting Business Valuable?

One of the most important aspects of reseller hosting is how easy you can implement it into your current business – especially if your work involves website design, development, management, or marketing.

Are you an online entrepreneur, blogger, web development firm, software house, or freelance web designer/marketer? Does Reseller hosting make sense for you?

Helps You Provide More Value

Your clients and customers have websites you work on or manage for them. And for any website to stay online and accessible via the internet, it must be hosted on a physical server that holds all the website’s data. Many of your clients don’t have the time to figure out the right hosting plans they need and what packages will give them the most value for their money.

Meanwhile, you, who’s in charge of their website management, have a solid idea of what they need and they will also trust your judgment. Reseller hosting allows you to provide customized plans and resources to your clients – you basically act as the middleman and can make sure your clients pay for the resources they need.

You Control Your Profit

You also get to decide how much you want to charge your clients and can turn in a nice profit as your client base grows.

If you also have a customer base or audience – say you are a blogger in the marketing niche and most of your readers are business owners with websites – you can customize and resell hosting plans to them and they will trust your discretion and judgment since you have been providing them with value for a while.

Reseller hosting is also the cheapest way to start providing hosting services to customers. You may not have the resources to buy your own servers and build a data center yet. By acting as a reseller, you don’t have to invest much money into your business.

Best Reseller Hosting Options

So what are the different kinds of hosting you can resell to your customers? You can resell almost any kind of hosting but the best options are – shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting, Cloud hosting, dedicated hosting, and managed Magento hosting. Let’s take a brief look at each and who they’re best for:

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular kind of hosting and the most widely used around the world. On shared hosting packages, multiple websites are hosted on the same physical server and share the computer’s resources – storage, bandwidth, RAM, CPU power, etc.

Thanks to the shared environment, shared hosting packages are the most affordable on the market. Shared hosting is best for entry-level business websites that don’t get a lot of traffic. If most of your customers and audience are bloggers, small businesses, freelancers with portfolio websites, etc., shared hosting plans are the best to sell to them.

Managed WordPress hosting

WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, hence WordPress-specific hosting plans are another good option to resell. WordPress hosting packages on many providers offer similar resources as their shared plans but also include specific features designed for WordPress.

Managed WordPress hosting packages, in particular, take out the hassle of managing the technical side of your WordPress site out of your hands, and completely done for you by the provider.

If many of your audience own WordPress websites or are business owners who run their stores on WordPress-native platforms like WooCommerce, managed WordPress hosting plans are the best for you to resell.

Cloud servers or cloud hosting

Cloud hosting packages or cloud servers are getting increasingly popular in the industry and are especially great for websites that experience traffic spikes or are growing quickly. On a cloud hosting plan, you can scale up or scale down the resources you are using from your hosting management dashboard as your traffic increases.

In a cloud hosting environment, multiple computers and servers pool their resources together allowing for more efficiency and higher speeds.

Cloud hosting assures near-perfect uptime and traffic-tracking bandwidth availability for businesses like streaming services, Ecommerce websites, fast-growing startups, etc. So if you work with these kinds of clients, you may want to consider reselling cloud server plans.

Dedicated hosting

Enter the domain of the big boys. Dedicated servers are exactly that – in this kind of hosting plan, you get a whole server (the same kind that powers hundreds of websites in a shared plan) all to yourself.

Dedicated hosting plans allow you to host unlimited websites, have a dedicated IP address, and give you complete control of your hosting environment. However, exclusive access to a whole server does not come cheap. Dedicated hosting plans are best for large businesses and enterprises that handle a lot of data – databases, thousands of orders in a day, etc. and need higher levels of security (especially those who handle sensitive data).

Managed Magento hosting

Magento powers hundreds of thousands of Ecommerce stores and now, hosting plans specially tailored for stores built on the platform are very popular.

Managed Magento hosting providers give Magento stores access to server resources as well as manage most of the technical stuff for them. If you have an audience of Ecommerce owners who use Magento, then you should consider reselling Magento hosting plans.

Important Elements for Reseller Hosting Business’ Success

The idea of a hosting reseller business can sound intriguing and you may be itching to get started as it’s a fast growing industry, however, there are a number of factors you have to consider to ensure your long-term success and the most satisfaction for your customers. Let’s take a look at some of them:

Your Reseller Hosting Provider

At the heart of all the action is the hosting provider whose services you’ll be reselling. You need to choose your reseller hosting provider very carefully as the plans, features, and tools they offer are exactly what you’ll work with as you resell their packages to your own customers.

The best reseller hosting providers on the market have to offer reseller plans obviously. Next, they should also have important features on even the most basic plans, all for a bargain. They should also have a good reputation with users.

Customer Support and Assistance

One major issue that the hosting reseller model promises to solve is poor customer support. Big hosting providers with millions of customers have fewer agents per customer and hence they usually have to wait in long queues or wait for a while to get help.

If you are looking to become a hosting reseller, you must be able to answer questions and provide solutions to your customers, hence it’s important that whatever hosting provider you choose provides support 24/7/365.

Your Marketing Strategy

Like with any business, having a solid marketing strategy and execution plan is vital to your success as a hosting reseller. To get the word out on your packages, you can run ads and campaigns for social media, email outreaches, paid ads on search engines like Google and Bing and pay influencers to endorse your services.

If you already have a thriving audience, you can simply create landing pages, make offers, and create marketing funnels and promote ads to your audience.

With an effective marketing strategy, you’ll increase awareness of your services and also show your target customers how your services are more tailored to their needs than the generic plans on the market.

Your Hosting Pricing

Pricing is another important factor to consider especially if you are offering the lower-ticket hosting services like shared and WordPress plans. Most of your customers would be small businesses who don’t have big budgets so you need to plan ahead to offer services that are affordable but still make a good profit.

For the higher-ticket plans, they can already get quite pricey from the vendor hosting provider and it’s easier to hit your profit targets and whatever extra you charge would not be as significant to your buyers.

Your Hosting Packages

What kinds of hosting packages have you decided to offer? And what features come with each bundle from the vendor provider? Whichever provider you choose to go for should offer plans with the most features out of the box – e.g a free domain/SSL, free backups, SSD storage, etc. – and should also allow unlimited websites to be hosted on their plans.

5 Steps To Build a Successful Reseller Hosting Business

And now, into the meat of things… What are the 5 exact steps you should take to build a successful reseller hosting business? Let’s dive in!

1. Good Web Host

This point should be engraved in stone. Just like we stated earlier, the first step you should take on your journey to becoming a successful hosting reseller is to choose the right host. There are thousands of hosting providers on the market – some good, many fair, and even more… just not worth it.

As a reseller, you don’t have control over the servers themselves or hardware for the most part. The hosting provider you choose owns the data centers that will in turn power the services you offer, so it’s important for you to choose a hosting provider that’s well known to provide excellent services and performance.

• Some features to look out for when considering a host are its pricing and plans, features offered out of the box, real-time performance and uptime guarantee, customer support, ease of use, server locations, etc.

• Particularly important are a host’s uptime, server response time, state-of-the-art content delivery solutions, the security systems they have in place, the quality of their servers and hardware, and how easy it is to upgrade your plans.

• Your host is the back-bone of the services you’ll be reselling. If they are not reliable, you also would not be able to provide reliable services and your customers will begin to search for better options, hence, the importance of choosing a good host.

2. Niche Down and Become an Expert

Another very important way to ensure your success as a hosting reseller is to provide niche services – i.e focus on an industry or on a particular customer persona.

If you’re looking to become a successful reseller, consider focusing on just one service suite or providing your hosting to a particular client profile. Providing niche services also helps establish your authority in that industry and prospects feel more confident in signing up because they feel you can understand them the most.

• There are thousands of hosting providers on the market today and many of them provide generic services and plans so that it’s become hard to choose because they’re very similar.

• For example, you could decide to focus only on WordPress plans and resell WordPress packages to your audience if many of them are WordPress website owners. Features like 1-click WordPress installs, automatic WP updates, WordPress acceleration, etc. will make your services stand out.
• Most big-name hosting providers have a designed set of services that are often too rigid and may not always fully meet the needs of customers. As a reseller, focusing on a niche can help you stand out in the noisy hosting market. Customize your solutions so your clients feel more satisfied and do business with you for a long time.

3. Provide Superior Customer Support

A successful business is one with satisfied customers. Customer support is one of the most essential elements any hosting provider must consider, and even more importantly for you as a reseller. Most hosting providers have very rigid customer service portals, mostly automated, thanks to the sheer number of customers they have and they struggle to cater for them.

This is the gap you should be looking to fill as a hosting reseller! You should provide multiple support portals – phone, live chat, bots, email, tickets, video guides, a blog, and knowledgebase. You can also manage a community or forum where your customers can ask questions and have an expert answer them.

Common Customer Support Complaints

If you did a little research and went through hosting reviews, you’d see that a major complaint from customers is poor support. Many times, instead of live agents, customers are only catered to by bots. Or it takes too long to get answers to inquiries. Or, the agents they talk to didn’t give all the answers they needed. The list goes on.

What You Should Do

The point is you should be more versatile and in-trend when giving your customers support. As people are spending more time on social media channels, you should also consider including links to your socials and attending to customer requests on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.

And finally, make it a habit to check reviews on hosting providers where they are complaining about support and what their main grievances are, so that you can avoid them and attract more customers to your brand.

4. Exceptional Marketing

We are in an attention economy. To get the word out on your business, appeal to prospects, and grow your business, you’d need to do a whole lot of marketing. And today, online marketing means more than running campaigns on just one channel.

You’d have to do thorough audience research, find out who your target customers are and where they hang out online. You’d also have to figure out their pain points and how they want hosting providers to perform better.

Running Ads

After creating your funnels, you can run ads on Google and Bing. Social media is where most people in the world spend their time online. So it’s important you have a social media presence.

Post helpful and fun content your target customers can relate to. You can also run social media ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. You can also pay influencers and popular faces with large social media followings in your industry to advertise your brand on their pages to help create awareness and draw visits.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is also now a powerful tool to grow your audience and convert them over time. An essential component of your content marketing would be to create a blog and start uploading evergreen articles on general hosting and online marketing topics.

With these, you can increase your reputation on Google and get better SEO rankings… and once you start getting organic visits and conversions, you’d spend less on paid ads.

Email Marketing

You can also plan and execute email marketing strategies with highly-personalized mails you send to your email list you’ve compiled from prospects filling forms on your website or signing up to your newsletter.

Continue A/B Testing

Do a lot of A/B testing to find out what appeals to your audience and what strategies bring the most ROI for your business. The marketing industry is also ever-changing, so you’d have to monitor current trends and what your competitors are doing and how you can do even better to ensure the success of your campaigns.

5. Automate Your Hosting Business and Earn Profits

There are many aspects of your business that will be repetitive and can be automated. E.g: billing a customer, sending a ‘Thank you’ email, subscription reminders, etc. Once your customer base starts to grow, it becomes extremely inefficient, time-consuming, and also expensive to have human employees do these tasks and follow up on clients.

Luckily, automation tools like WHMCS (WebHost Manager Complete Solutions) are designed to do just that – do the bulky, repetitive tasks for you, so you can focus on other important aspects of your business like expanding your customer base and increasing your customer satisfaction.

To make money and earn great profits as a hosting reseller, you’d need to continually scale your business and automation is a major contributor to that for any business today. On the backend of your business – your own hosting account – you have access to tools like cPanel or a custom control panel that simplify managing your packages so you don’t have to do anything in code.

Choose The Best Web Hosting Reseller

Reseller hosting can be a profitable business if you follow these steps – choose the right web hosting reseller, niche down and become known in an industry, provide superb support to your customers, use multi-channel marketing to advertise your services, and you scale your business by automating repetitive tasks.

So how to choose the right hosting provider with reseller services?

Find the Best Web Hosting on HostAdvice – we’ve reviewed hundreds of the best hosting providers in both standalone reviews and side by side comparisons.

Next Steps: What now?

• Find the best reseller hosting provider
• Do market research and figure out your marketing channels
• Decide on your company name and buy a domain
• Design your website with a website builder
• Sign up for a reseller package and start small
• Start marketing your services
• Set up customer support channels
• Automate your tasks and scale

Further reading – Useful Resources

• The best reseller hosting providers in 2023.
• The best website builders we recommend.