Introduction and Basic Info
I spent a lot of time lurking here, and wracking my brain on how to give back to the community. Figured a data sheet was a good start. I'll give a brief introduction about how I got started, and then a run down on how to roll your own reselling business. Hopefully it will be informative, both for the cats that want a profitable side-hustle, and for those who have websites but want to reduce the costs.
A business is born...
I've been making good money over the last few years reselling server space to small businesses and individuals who are looking for cheap hosting. At university I had a side hustle doing web design for students. There were a bunch of entrepreneurial types who were always trying to start blogs or ecommerce sites. I would charge a small fee to get their site up a running. Most of them had zero experience with web hosting or making websites, so they were glad to pay me to do the "technical" work. They would hand over their hosting login and password, and I would set up the site.
After getting frustrated signing into GoDaddy and HostGator and BlueHost, and a bunch of other terrible hosting company interfaces, I decided I could eliminate hassle by getting my own server.
Asking around, I found most of my clients were paying between $5-10 a month for their hosting. After some more research, I realized there were hosting companies that offered servers to resell for around that same price. That's where my current business started.
How it works
When someone wants to make a website, they need the following:
A domain name (~$10 a year)
Hosting (~$5-10 a month, $60-120 a year)
Typically they will go to a big name hosting service like GoDaddy, and pay around $150 a year for the whole package (hosting and domain).
This is a reasonable price, but if you do some legwork, you can offer a cheaper price for better service.
Here's how it works:
1. Get a reseller hosting plan, these run under $20 a month and offer more bandwidth and server space with the added ability to make subordinate accounts on the server.
2. Set up a basic website advertising your services with a PayPal or other recurring payment ability.
3. Sell your extra server space
4. Profit
It's really that simple!
How I do it
I started with a $25/month plan that had enough space and bandwidth to comfortably support 100 medium traffic websites. That's an effective price of around $.25 a month per site. So I went around to my design clients and offered to undercut the price of their hosting if they moved to my server.
They were happy to save 50% a month and I was happy to make $5 each month on resources I was paying less than a dollar for. After a few clients, the server paid for itself, and any additional clients became pure profit.
Once I got a base of clients and some testimonials, I started going around to local businesses and offering to move their websites. I didn't charge anything for the move, and would make sure to undercut the price they were paying for hosting. Since most people never moved past the basic $10 a month GoDaddy plan, it was easy to offer a cheaper alternative.
For most of my early clients, I also offered to do customer support, set up email addresses, do site designs, etc. These are things that you pay extra for on a normal hosting account, but come free with reseller accounts. I realized I left a lot of money on the table in the form of upsells, but now that I have a larger number of clients, I don't offer those services as often.
As I learned more and got more clients, I upgraded to better reseller accounts and eventually started to pay for a VPS and then a dedicated server. As the business has scaled, my cost per client went down, and my profit margin has steadily gotten better. Now it brings in a good amount of money each month with very minimal maintenance.
Start your own
It's really easy to start your own reselling business. If you already pay for hosting for your own website, it can be an effective way to reduce (or even zero-out) your costs.
Go to any hosting site and purchase a reseller account:
I use Lithium Hosting. Full disclosure: that's an affiliate link that will give me around 25% commission (at no extra charge to you) if you buy hosting with them. I use them myself, and wouldn't put it there if I didn't stand by their services. They have great customer support, and a cheap starter plan for $15 a month. There are a bunch of other ones, and all the big names (GoDaddy, BlueHost, etc) have reseller accounts.
Find a few clients:
These can be local business, friends, family, pretty much anyone who needs a website. Since they would have to pay for hosting anyways and usually don't know much about the details, if you make them a good offer they will more likely than not be willing to start with you, or move their site. Even if it's just you and three friends that want to start websites, your costs will be much lower by going with the reseller account.
Profit and scale:
Calculate your average cost per site, and make sure you are making a good profit margin. After a few clients you will break even on the costs of the account. This is an easy way to run your blog basically for free, because you can use your own server while other people pay you for the privilege. Once you are brining enough in to upgrade, upgrade to a better account and you will continue to have room to add clients for awhile.
Conclusion
Coupled with a design or copywritting freelance hustle, this can be a good side gig or full-on business. For me it started as an easy way to make a few bucks, but turned into a more profitable venture than my original freelancing.
If you guys have any questions, drop me a line, or leave a note in the thread. I've been doing website stuff for many years now, so if other members want to chime in with their experiences that would be cool too. If you want some more information on how I found and onboarded clients, managed billing, etc, I can add some more info on those things. If you want to start your own site or buy hosting, PM me, I'll give RVF members a discount or something.
Seriously though, you are better off getting your own reseller account and finding a few guys to pay you. Hopefully this data sheet was helpful and gives some of you ideas.
I spent a lot of time lurking here, and wracking my brain on how to give back to the community. Figured a data sheet was a good start. I'll give a brief introduction about how I got started, and then a run down on how to roll your own reselling business. Hopefully it will be informative, both for the cats that want a profitable side-hustle, and for those who have websites but want to reduce the costs.
A business is born...
I've been making good money over the last few years reselling server space to small businesses and individuals who are looking for cheap hosting. At university I had a side hustle doing web design for students. There were a bunch of entrepreneurial types who were always trying to start blogs or ecommerce sites. I would charge a small fee to get their site up a running. Most of them had zero experience with web hosting or making websites, so they were glad to pay me to do the "technical" work. They would hand over their hosting login and password, and I would set up the site.
After getting frustrated signing into GoDaddy and HostGator and BlueHost, and a bunch of other terrible hosting company interfaces, I decided I could eliminate hassle by getting my own server.
Asking around, I found most of my clients were paying between $5-10 a month for their hosting. After some more research, I realized there were hosting companies that offered servers to resell for around that same price. That's where my current business started.
How it works
When someone wants to make a website, they need the following:
A domain name (~$10 a year)
Hosting (~$5-10 a month, $60-120 a year)
Typically they will go to a big name hosting service like GoDaddy, and pay around $150 a year for the whole package (hosting and domain).
This is a reasonable price, but if you do some legwork, you can offer a cheaper price for better service.
Here's how it works:
1. Get a reseller hosting plan, these run under $20 a month and offer more bandwidth and server space with the added ability to make subordinate accounts on the server.
2. Set up a basic website advertising your services with a PayPal or other recurring payment ability.
3. Sell your extra server space
4. Profit
It's really that simple!
How I do it
I started with a $25/month plan that had enough space and bandwidth to comfortably support 100 medium traffic websites. That's an effective price of around $.25 a month per site. So I went around to my design clients and offered to undercut the price of their hosting if they moved to my server.
They were happy to save 50% a month and I was happy to make $5 each month on resources I was paying less than a dollar for. After a few clients, the server paid for itself, and any additional clients became pure profit.
Once I got a base of clients and some testimonials, I started going around to local businesses and offering to move their websites. I didn't charge anything for the move, and would make sure to undercut the price they were paying for hosting. Since most people never moved past the basic $10 a month GoDaddy plan, it was easy to offer a cheaper alternative.
For most of my early clients, I also offered to do customer support, set up email addresses, do site designs, etc. These are things that you pay extra for on a normal hosting account, but come free with reseller accounts. I realized I left a lot of money on the table in the form of upsells, but now that I have a larger number of clients, I don't offer those services as often.
As I learned more and got more clients, I upgraded to better reseller accounts and eventually started to pay for a VPS and then a dedicated server. As the business has scaled, my cost per client went down, and my profit margin has steadily gotten better. Now it brings in a good amount of money each month with very minimal maintenance.
Start your own
It's really easy to start your own reselling business. If you already pay for hosting for your own website, it can be an effective way to reduce (or even zero-out) your costs.
Go to any hosting site and purchase a reseller account:
I use Lithium Hosting. Full disclosure: that's an affiliate link that will give me around 25% commission (at no extra charge to you) if you buy hosting with them. I use them myself, and wouldn't put it there if I didn't stand by their services. They have great customer support, and a cheap starter plan for $15 a month. There are a bunch of other ones, and all the big names (GoDaddy, BlueHost, etc) have reseller accounts.
Find a few clients:
These can be local business, friends, family, pretty much anyone who needs a website. Since they would have to pay for hosting anyways and usually don't know much about the details, if you make them a good offer they will more likely than not be willing to start with you, or move their site. Even if it's just you and three friends that want to start websites, your costs will be much lower by going with the reseller account.
Profit and scale:
Calculate your average cost per site, and make sure you are making a good profit margin. After a few clients you will break even on the costs of the account. This is an easy way to run your blog basically for free, because you can use your own server while other people pay you for the privilege. Once you are brining enough in to upgrade, upgrade to a better account and you will continue to have room to add clients for awhile.
Conclusion
Coupled with a design or copywritting freelance hustle, this can be a good side gig or full-on business. For me it started as an easy way to make a few bucks, but turned into a more profitable venture than my original freelancing.
If you guys have any questions, drop me a line, or leave a note in the thread. I've been doing website stuff for many years now, so if other members want to chime in with their experiences that would be cool too. If you want some more information on how I found and onboarded clients, managed billing, etc, I can add some more info on those things. If you want to start your own site or buy hosting, PM me, I'll give RVF members a discount or something.
Seriously though, you are better off getting your own reseller account and finding a few guys to pay you. Hopefully this data sheet was helpful and gives some of you ideas.