Hello everyone! A friend of mine referred me to this website because I’m very interested in starting up a business. I chose this particular forum because what I would like to do falls under it.

Just to give you a little bit of background info on my situation and myself: I love web design! It is my passion. I started fiddling around with web design when I was in the 10th grade. I could never find any programs around town to learn web design so I ended up teaching it to myself. I am currently about to begin my senior year in college this upcoming August, and my major is Information Systems and Decision Sciences. I currently design websites for student organizations and just for fun.

Well, now my mom wants me to design her a website which I’m cool with. I always wanted to start up a little web design company. She told all of her friends, and now they all want me to do theirs to. Well I have a domain and am hosted, but it won’t allow me to make separate accounts for my customers. It runs out next month anyway and I’m not renewing it because the host basically sucked.

So I guess my question would be should I be looking into web hosting for my customers or reselling? I was thinking that the reselling might be the best bet since what I really want to get into is the web design.

Any input or stories would be greatly appreciated from you all, the people who actually have web hosting companies. Well, while I wait for some responses…I’ll go do a little more research. This is the first reseller host thing that I found: http://gearhost.com/partners/resellers/

Reselling would be offering web hosting to your customers.

I would reccommend getting a reseller account with a company like MCHost (http://www.mchost.com) where you can host unlimited domains on a certian disk space/bandwidth.

I have used MCHost and have been very satisfied with the service there.

Getting your own servers would be great, but without the knowledge to administer them yourself you're going to pay literally hundreds of dollars a month per server. Why not start out small and work your way up!

MCHost plans start at $35/month for 1 GB space and 14 GB bandwidth and you can put as many sites on there as you'd like.

I would recommend not starting two different threads on the same subject in two different areas of the forum. :rolleyes:

It's just annoying. other thread (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=52905)

<<MOD NOTE: Other thread locked up>>

But, to answer your question, sure; resell first.

Yes, a resellers type account would be best for you. You could also make money of this along with your web design. A complete service to your clients.

I would also recommend reselling,
there are many companies to choose from such as www.voxtreme.com (http://www.voxtreme.com) and www.splashost.com (http://www.splashost.com) as well as the already mentioned mchost.

I have used mchost in the past and am currently using Voxtreme, I would recommend Voxtreme, Their support is very very good and very fast.
I have never used Splashost but there is also lots of praise for them in this forum.

I would stay away from Gearhost. I had a bad experience with them, I was only hosted with them for a few months because of their terribly slow tech support and on and off servers.

I could never reach a real person by phone and they'd never call back. I'd send multiple e-mails and recieve short answers 3 days later. Ontop of all that their billing software is buggy and they charged me for and extra month of hosting, which I had a hard time in getting a hold of anyone to refund my money and cancel my account.

I have heard good things about Splash host but if you plan on hosting popular forums (like vBB) then look elsewhere.

I'd also recommend reselling. I've used 3 private label resellers:

- http://web229.net : the worst support (if you can call it support) I ever experienced, servers were fast though

- http://www.digihost.com : no major problems, but they suddenly started charging additionally per domain (and also charged setup per domain)

- http://www.mchost.com : I really feel at home here. There have been some problems on older servers, but the support has always been great and very helpful. The online forum is also a big help.

Here is one host I did not try, but I contacted them and they seem to be ok: http://www.hostnexus.com