There's a technical concept of reselling that is confusing me.

Typically if I wanted to be a reseller, I would sign up for a resller account with a company. What I don't quite grasp is, do my customers then host their sites in my webspace and share my bandwidth, or when I sign a new customer, do I sign them up for a account, completely separate in terms of disk space and bandwith (e.g.) from mine? Or does it depend on the company you sign up with as a reseller?

Hope that makes sense!

Thanks

The Answer is both. some give you a big account...usually called semi-dedicated, wholesale, or something like that and you divide that space among ppl. There is also reselling of pre-existing packages that are fixed! To see examples, take a look at http://www.aletia.com/reseller/ I don't work for/with them...just considering them and they have the pefect example for this.

There are 2 different types of reseller plans:

1) You buy one large account and host all domains under the same disk space and bandwidth.

2) You buy a separate account for each domain.

Either way, each reseller provider has in some way or another a different structure and it depends on your business plans which type is the best for you. :)

What Kiwi said is right. There are some things too.

1) When you buy a larger account and share the disk space with your clients, you can design your own plans.

2) When you buy separate accounts for each new customers, you can't design your own package and must sell the packages of whom you resell for.

Hope that help you a little more :)

Excellent! Thankyou for clearing that up.

I don't know if are already aware of this but you should also check other details of the reseller offer:

1. If the nameservers (i.e. IP's are included in your reseller package). Usually, a lot of companies are asking you money for setting up and event to pay a monthly fee (5-10 dollars each nameservers) when in fact you receive only the IP, which costs between 1 and 2 dollars/month, and this is a generous estimation.

2. You should also check how much are you charged for extra traffic in order to avoid future problems. A reasonable price range is 3-6 USD/Gb. Check also the price for hard disk space.

3. Your traffic is composed by http traffic, ftp traffic and email traffic. You should ask which kind of traffic are you paying for.

4. Ask about databases. How many do you have in your reseller package.

5. SMTP support is another thing you should have in your package. A lot of companies are offering this in standard. If you can not read this on their site, ask them.

6. You should also ask some questions about the technical support, basically how fast they are answering your questions. The quality of the answers you will receive is another issue and therefore you should check this before starting putting your client sites there.

7. Allways check if you have a money back guarantee. It's just better.

8. You should start your activity by thorughly testing 2 or 3 domains you own. Test CGI, PHP, ASP, everything is possible. You can find some good scripts at www.hotscripts.com. It is better to take some time to do that because it's EXTREMELY embarassing to have some clients trying to make something to work and dicovering that not all things are OK on the server.

9. Ask if your email accounts are "living" same web space or not. Same for the databases.

10. Start collecting the technical information, for example the paths for PERL, SENDMAIL, ...

11. You should allways keep in mind that you are dealing with humans so they are doing mistakes sometimes. THIS DOES NOT MEAN that they are not competent... they made mistakes.

12. When you see that after 4-5 messages asking for help you receive answers after more than 24 hours and these answers are not addressing your problem / solving it, you MUST think seriously to change your partner.

13. IMPORTANT: the company you are buying from is YOUR PARTNER and they should also treat you as a PARTNER.

That's all for the moment.

Good luck.

Toma, thanks for the post - excellent suggestion! You've given me a lot to think about.

Originally posted by stodge
Toma, thanks for the post - excellent suggestion! You've given me a lot to think about.

I second this; very good tips.

Ryan

Also, some hosts have a referal program (an Account Executive, Account Representatove etc).

Basically, with such a program you sell thier hosting plans at thier prices and collect a fee for each plan you sell. The fee can be a one-time or residual commission (I think the latter is better as you get a continual cash flow in!).

It's a good option especially if you don't want to deal with the technical side of reselling just yet. You just have to concentrate on selling.