Hi, im new here and ive noticed there's a lot of quite similar topic. But still, there's something that i need to ask.

Im very very interested in opening my own hosting company, but im still unsure about the process. Correct me if Im wrong. Im going to start with reseller and then upgrade the plan as my company grow then maybe i will move to a VPS or maybe dedicated server. For the billing system, I want to use WHMCS because of the reputation and very good reviews about it on WHT.

And,

1- How to start selling domain to my customer?
2- Overselling, is it good or bad? And what is the safest limit to oversell?
3- What should I do if my customer ask a question or having troubles and I dont know the answer.

Welcome

You have to plan out your business strategy. Make a business plan and plan for all of your worst business scenarios.

You can sell domains by being a reseller, just research on WHT and you will find your answer.

How are going to offer support??

Is there going to be a third party Involved in your business that offers support?
Who is your market and how are you going to go after it.

Overselling: I would not suggest it. It is a bad business approach and it will jeopardise your business in the long run.

You can notice the companies that do and they disappear soon after.

Remember to plan out your business approach. Most of you answers are in WHF just search and read what has everyone gone through to avoid their mistakes.

Remember that no one will tell you the their business secrets, it is something you will have to learn yourself.

Good Luck
Greg

1- How to start selling domain to my customer?
You can sign up a reseller account with enom to sell domains.
2- Overselling, is it good or bad? And what is the safest limit to oversell?
Of course, it is bad!
3- What should I do if my customer ask a question or having troubles and I dont know the answer.
You can rent outsource support or hire experience staffs to support your customers.

However, it is not simple as you think. I recommend to learn more about this industry, or you may not able to compete with other big companies.

ServerVina is right and to the point!

Hi :)

1- How to start selling domain to my customer?

As someone else said, get an enom reseller account, some hosts can provide this for you, and you can also get one free with most billing systems

2- Overselling, is it good or bad? And what is the safest limit to oversell?

Overselling is generally considered to be bad, although this is something there are 100's of threads on here that would be worth a read :)

3- What should I do if my customer ask a question or having troubles and I dont know the answer.

You have a choice here, you could get outsourced support staff, you could get your own staff or you could find a company that will support your end users as well as host you. There are a few of these about.

Beyond your questions...

You need a firm business plan, you should talk to people here learn from what they can teach you, there is a huge amount of really helpful posts and people on this forum that can help you, just ask. you also need to decide how you want to start, do you want to get a reseller plan? a vps? or jump in at the deepend with a dedicated server. It depends very much on what you know and feel happy with.
Of course there are managed VPS and Dedicated server companies that can take away lots of the hard work in running the servers for you, but you must be careful as to what people mean when they say Managed as the definition varies from company to company.

Then there is your budget to consider, what can you afford? how do you want to market your company? all these things need to be looked at before you start.

If you want some advice on anything drop me a pm or email, I'm working on all these things in some way or another myself currently, namely marketing, so perhaps throwing some ideas about would be good for everyone :)

Good Luck!

Maybe i will just start with reseller first. Found a few host that suite my needs and reading reviews about their services before choosing. Still researching on the business plan. Based on other threads here, overselling does have a bad reputation :P. Thanks for help, I really appreciate your reply.

Maybe i will just start with reseller first. Found a few host that suite my needs and reading reviews about their services before choosing. Still researching on the business plan. Based on other threads here, overselling does have a bad reputation :P. Thanks for help, I really appreciate your reply.

Some of the most successful companies that started in this community are oversellers. Don't take this "bad reputation" to be fact, you need to research what you can offer, and for what price, and make decisions based on that.

Ask yourself this - any company that gives you X space and X bandwidth. Most people don't max it out right, sure they might go to 490 / 500 but they leave that room in there so they dont get charged crazy prices for going over. Well what if you took that 10 mb and added it up over 50 accounts, well there you have an extra 1 account without any additional resources needed.

What happens now, well... its like a free account, the company makes more money, they can offer you better prices on a similar account. It's a never-ending cycle down to the point of "i can afford to give them X, they take Y". When Y is more than X, the company goes under.

So my point is you can legitimately buy an account that you use twice as much resources as it costs the company... ie they are losing money on you. It happens all the time at dreamhost in particular. Or you can use an account that costs the company 50% of it's resources, but costs you 4x as much money out of pocket.

It's all about how you look at it. If you can max out some company at 500GB/month as an overseller before they kick you off... but for the same price you can only max out a "normal" host for 100GB/month, why would you NOT go with the overseller?

IMO the people who should be complaining about overselling are the guys who use 5MB/month... not the guys who use 500GB/month

Why would the company do this? Well it turns out a lot of people dont use what they are allocated, so it is in fact WASTEFULL to not sell your servers to the max. Overselling is an easy way to accomplish this. You can also max out servers without overselling, but it takes much more effort (ie cost to you) and in the end... non-oversellers are basically wasting energy by having their CPU's and disks sit at 50% full.

Go green by overselling? Hmm, this seems like a trendy new angle on such a despised business model in the past. :) You heard it here first, I call dibs on that patent. :p