Hi. I am about to start a small web hosting company. I just want to do it as a side business, I plan to get customers mostly by friends and word of mouth.

However, I will have new customers that want to register new domains. What is the best way to handle this. I liked everything about OpenSRS except for the $250 startup fee. Godaddy requires $99/year which is too much of a committment. I have contacted enom and my.register.com for further details..

Bulkregister.com looks like it is a $79 startup fee, but is this a good deal? I plan to register anywhere from 2 to 15 domains per month, I'm really not sure how quickly I will grow.

So I thought about just registering the domains individually, manually. I would bill the customer for a domain, and then manually register it myself, but putting the customer's name as the Registrant Contact, and mine as the Billing and Technical. I definately want to let my customer have ownership of the domain in case my hosting company crashes or they just want to do something else with it.

what do you guys think?

thanks

I was debating the same thing last week, as I too set up a design/hosting company since I already designed and host a few freinds small company websites. Dotster offers a free reseller program. It takes a little bit of work with the CSS to get their code to look good in your site (atleast that was the case in mine).
The only catch is that they don't support secure image hosting so you have to have a secure area to host your images for the pages that load off of their server or you get the "this page contains both secure and nonsecure items". In the end I decided not to resell Domain names and just either let register their own name or add it to the bill.

I've just recently decided to start the same sidejob. I'm basically doing reselling just to pay for hosting my own personal sites. I've been shopping around for reseller and affiliate programs and it does seem like Dotster is the easiest solution. I think I'm going to get some food and coffee go at their code tonight. I'll keep you updated. Thanks for the hint about the images sloop.

datumax, I ended up signing up as an affiliate with newlinkone.com .. Although they won't let you do your own billing, the setup seems pretty easy and flexible.

Contact http://powerpipe.com

They will set you up with an enom account. There are two options. One is like $21.99 setup and you fund your account with $100 at a time to buy domains at $7.99.

I think this is right. Email them to ask.

With the powerpipe/enom system, you can enter domain registrations manually through an online form and then give your customers a username and password to manage their domain through the http://access.enom.com interface.

You could take a look at ****************. No setup fees and register domains for $9.99 I think.

edit- Orrr not.