Hi all

I'm looking to get into the reseller business on a rather small level. I've put up a few small websites for local businesses and figure I may as well start hosting them as well both for the small bit of extra income every month and hopefully to have more direct and consistent access to their sites for fixes and updates.

I'm looking at HG for its (mostly) positive reviews in these forums and just wanted to know (as a total newbie) how much hands-on work is required in order to be a reseller, particularly in terms of billing and support questions or problems (the clients, not mine). Does the host handle tech issues directly or do I forward tickets from clients, etc.? Bottom line how much time would I be committing to and would I need to learn to troubleshoot mySQL in order to make this work?

And and all advice greatly appreciated

Without knowing how HG works for support tickets, it's common practice for an end user (your client) to send you a ticket. If you then can't handle it, you open a ticket at HG and explain to them the situation, and they take care of it (if it's within their support parameters).

Billing and invoicing is up to you. There's a multitude of software out there, such as Lpanel, WHM Autopilot, Modernbill, Ubersmith, etc..

I second what Anthony said, that is what most resellers do.

You mentioned direct handling, some companies do provide that option, it is called end-user support; you can do some research on that. If you want to expand past a reseller in the future however, I would suggest you stick with supporting your own customers.

Yes, you might initially go for a host with end-user support. That should take off a lot of support load from your back. But if you really want to adopt hosting as your main business, you would be good to start working on supporting clients on your own. That way once you have grown, you would not be out-of-place in answering basic questions like creating an email account through CPanel.

Then there are reseller programs that work more like an affiliate program than true reseller, your main job being to find customers. It all depend on how much time you're willing to commit.

One problem with hosting is that it is a 24 hours service and (depending a bit on your target market) customers might want/expect 24/7 support, which obviously can't be provided on your own.

would I need to learn to troubleshoot mySQL in order to make this work?I'm not sure what you mean. Server management as a whole would be your provider's job.

Server management as a whole would be your provider's job.

Agreed, the good thing about being a reseller is you dont have to take the pain of what us admins have to do ;)

Although if you ever went dedicated/vps then you would have to do this.

With a reseller account, you have no root access. Any issues that are server-related would need to be handled by your web host. The server is managed and maintained by the web hosting company.