ok, lets imagine a person buys a reselling plan and wants to sell them. so he has to design a website to tell the whole world. he has 2 important choices to make:

1. update his homepage (myhomepage.com) and add a 'hosting' section which shows all his plans. and refers to himself as "I"

OR

2. get a new domain and boasts that he is some new hosting company, a professional website design, and makes up some false info of how many employees there are, it's history, and in short, he refers to himself as "WE".


which would u think would be better for a person just starting out as a reseller?

Just starting out?

I'd go option 1.


Lats...

Well I did #2.

I got a designer to build a nice looking site for me, and called myself "WE".

Lohosting doesn't boast about the staff it employs, but it does get difficult when one of your potential customers asks "How many servers do you own?" "What connections do you have?" "How many people work for you?" "Are you really the chairman, or just a sales rep?"

These are all questions which although you are able to bend the truth when you answer, you can never honestly tell them what they want to hear.

If you use option 1, and just say "I", then the chances are, no-ones going to use you because of the time it will take to get technical support etc.

If you use "WE", then you can put delays down to being over-run with staff shortages etc (when you're at work or at hone asleep etc).

In short, it really depends on how it will affect your personal life, and what kind of image you want to promote of your hosting company if you want it to grow.

I use #2, and nothing else, because to a certain extent you are covered if it takes a few days to answer a technical email (this gives you time to contact the reselling company and get the answers). I don't pretend to be a big company though - I openly admit that we are small and there are about 3 people working at my company. This also covers me, because then people want to support the growth of your company, and they suggest new ideas for it to grow. Customers are also impressed if you talk to them on Instant Messengers (Yahoo, MSN etc), because they think that you are willing to chat and give advice on a friendly basis.

BEWARE about what you say though when you talk live. It's very easy to get yourself into a mess.

Try to keep chats, short but nice. Try to use email for the business side of things - This can give you the opportunity to stall those questions that are going to be tricky to answer.

Also beware: Some customers do know exactly what they are doing, and think that it's fun to do a reverse DNS lookup on your so called "Annonymous DNS server" and reveal to the world that your a one-man-band reseller on some big forum or something.

You may also get the odd customer that will sign up, run every test possible on your network, and then leave when he get's his results.

I'm a reseller for donhost, and although they have taken extensive measures to hide their ID to resellers customers, I uploaded one PHP script, executed it, and instantly found the O/S version, who it was licensed to (Donhost), and all the other stuff I would not want my customers to find.

One way to escape this, is to say that you have some type of sales rep contract with a hosting company - this is not a lie, but it's not exactly truthful either. It will however cover you if it's in the small print when one of your customers reveals your operation to your other customers on your own support forums etc.....


Just my 2 cents...

If you want to save on hosting, you can add it to your personal site, but a new site that's well designed and dedicated to web hosting would probably look more professional.

You can likely go with a middle ground. If you're going to set up as a reseller, you'll be picking a plan with your upstream provider who will be giving you a certain amount of space and bw to sell, so why don't you just put your hosting site on that server? It won't cost you any extra...you'll just be using up a bit of your sellable space and bw.

I certainly wouldn't recommend making any false claims about how many employess you have, or how many accounts you have. Anything like that tends to come back and bite you right in the a** over time. It's just not worth it.

I suppose you can say "we" instead of "I". But misrepresenting much more might come back to haunt you.

Just set up a site to look as professional as you are able, pick a good reliable host, put in some reasonably competitive pricing (cheapest is not always best), and promote, promote, promote.

And to start, try promoting locally where you live. You'll end up getting much cleaner business, especially from local businesses that do not use alot of bw. And you can bet they won't be spammers.

Hope that helps.

Vito

guess people will have to create an imaginery business information, hehe so that they don't get mixed up when telling how many servers ya got, whose the chairman? whos the administrator, etc.

just need creativty and skill in avoiding trouble. (kinda reminds me of my excuses with the principle whenever i come late.) :)

its hard to hide being a reseller :bawling:

Originally posted by NumLock
guess people will have to create an imaginery business information, hehe so that they don't get mixed up when telling how many servers ya got, whose the chairman? whos the administrator, etc.

just need creativty and skill in avoiding trouble. (kinda reminds me of my excuses with the principle whenever i come late.) :) I disagree that you have to make up an imaginery business. Nowadays many people gravitate towards one-person businesses providing personal service. I have no problem telling customers that I am the "chief cook and bottle washer." On the other hand, questions like "how many servers do you have" can be answered honestly by telling them "as many as my customers need!" :D

Regards,


Keith

well, i was reffering to a plan. like a person can make a list of wat to say when a question arises so that he doesn't get stuck and tells different people different answers (which is bad).