Hi,

I have some bucks and I wanted to start a reseller business. In short, I have little spend on marketing, and I have yet to explore this market in full. But be honest, is there any compeition left in the hosting market?

I mean; does reselling hosting make money NOW? ~ Cause I wanted to resell hosting but not sure how it will work, I might lose all initial investment right?

Be honest :)

You can start to sell hosting with a too little budget. So you don't worry what you lose your money. If you create a good business plan and work hard when you can make much money.

You can surely do money if you do hard.

offcourse you can make money, but you have to work really hard and provide really good service

If you choose your provider very carefully and have a target market in mind, then if you have the time and even better the money you can make it work.

We where been charged for Secure folders, MSSQL and MySQL by our old hosting company. It worked out that they where paying the same per year as a Dedicated server costs.

So we got our own server and some of the customers from the old supplier have moved to us.

So if you are willing to put a bit of hard work in then it can work for you.

I think you can do it if you can find a "niche" within web hosting rather than taking on the big boys who offer cheap mass web hosting. A niche example might be specialising in clan hosting or joomla hosting. There are loads of other niches however.

It seems that all answers agree on one point:

Working hard, spending little money so that I do not have to worry about initial investment.

My worries are:

Lack of linux, and server administration
Lack of big investment

I also ask myself a question very often before I jump into this:

"Why will a customer choose me and not the mother company which offers "dirt-cheap" web hosting with free months, free domain, and everything?"

I think most resellers depend on local clients, am I right? ~ because It is impossible to compete with big boys,

Thanks

Well the "big boys" can't offer personal support like you can, although yes local clients and people you know and can find are a big part of your business.

Pick your provider carefully as you will be very dependant on them.

Ask some questions to a couple of hosts and get a feel for the host and go from there.

One thing Personalized service which no big company can provide .. and yes first you have to depend on local clients

Start with reseller packages in which you don't have to manage server, and when you have more clients then shift to managed VPS or Server

As I say find a niche and get good at it. Then people would have a reason to host with you. Its not possible even for the big players to offer good tech support on almost everything. Also if you start with a reseller you haven't got to worry too much about server administration. If you start with a VPS or dedicated server there are probably dozens of guys on this forum that could admin and manage it for you.

There are several niche markets, Ebay, Turnkey, Certain Industry design depends on your experience and the time you want to put into it

I offer hosting to my existing (and potential) marketing services clients. I don't have "open hosting" - this means I'm not competing against everyone who does. I provide site design and other services to go along with the hosting packages, which I sell to companies who are more interested in a complete package than they are in the lowest price.

What I'm saying is, there are different ways of selling hosting services and making money. You could specialize in one type of client (gamers, musicians, visual artists, health care companies, etc.), one type of add-on service (site design, Domain Name registration, horse boarding, whatever), or some other specialty that allows you to offer hosting to your clients, rather than having them come (price) shopping for you.

All mentioned points are very well received. Thanks!
I think the good way to start something like this is to maybe offer it as a package or to be targetting a specific niche as you suggested.

The general, open hosting has a very high competition.

I can find a service that I can offer beside hosting, and provide them as a package for a lower price. Maybe that's a start kick.

Before starting the business try to put your self in the seat in the customers and ask yourself why would customers choose your service ?

Find a small niche and dominate it by offering good service at a good price. Don't compete on price. After you are doing well in that niche, expand into another similar one and repeat.

So, how to find niches ?

Yes, how to find those niches? .. I think there is no competition left for any new hosts, imagine customers are angry at top hosts like hostgator what will I do and I am only one person operating this.

I mean how to deal with people and you know its one man company.

"How do you find niches?"

In my case, I offer hosting to existing and new clients for my main business. It goes hand-in-hand with the other services I offer. BTW, I am a "one person business," but I also have interns from the local university, plus I hire help for specific jobs from time to time.

If you think web hosting (or anything else, anywhere else in life) is going to be a magic wand that delivers waves of money into you bank account without doing any work, you're sorely mistaken. But by the same token, if I sell one 100 MB web site yearly contract to a client, I've covered all of my reseller account fees for that year. Anything beyond that is theoretically profit.

Finding your niche requires that you actually think. Again, if you believe that any one of us can hand you a magic list of niches that hasn't been cherry-picked, well. . . that isn't the case. What is it you already do? What are you already an expert at, or studying to become an expert at? What subjects do you like? What hobbies do you have? What kind of people do you like spending time with?

When you know the answers to these questions, you can begin applying that self knowledge to finding an industry that's underserviced in terms of web hosting, or that you can service in a better or different way.

Find something you know or would like to learn. Realtors/lawyers in your area, a specific technology like coldfusion. Think small, but keep it something you can be interested in.

For someone new to the arena, you can laser target any small advertising budget, and anything that at least 1 person does in this world has at least 1 forum dedicated to it. Join that forum, get to know the users and contribute valuable posts. The community will get to know you and will be more likely to purchase services from you.

You won't get a lot of customers quickly, but you'll be able to learn how to run the company without dealing with hundreds of customers relying on you.

True points. Also a concern to a new person in business like me would be the "responsability" I hold for hosting these people. If their sites go down, how to deal with support queries, etc.

But I think this falls in choosing a reliable reseller package provider, the mother company has to be solid.

There is something thats spreading out nowadays, like phpbb hosting, joomla hosting, and that stuff. I might be interested in something like this.

Actually, I love wordpress.

Hi,

I have some bucks and I wanted to start a reseller business. In short, I have little spend on marketing, and I have yet to explore this market in full. But be honest, is there any compeition left in the hosting market?

I mean; does reselling hosting make money NOW? ~ Cause I wanted to resell hosting but not sure how it will work, I might lose all initial investment right?

Be honest :)

tell me where is not a competition???

You will always have competition, Why do you feel you should be a monopoly? You are matthew lesko who wants free money. You need to work your butt off in this industry, you need to have ethical standards, you need to support your clients and do the best you can. If you can achieve those things, you can charge the higher prices because EVERYONE will rave about your high standards and will justify the cost because of that.

The best thing you can do is to sell to locals, and you can provide them the best support because you can go to them if necessary. Join your local Chamber of Commerce too, they have monthly get-togethers that you can network with. I think you feel hosting is sitting behind a desk and people just flock to you, it is alot of door-knocking, it is slow and it is very rewarding if you do the right thing.

I mean; does reselling hosting make money NOW?

It takes time to build enough backlog to make money, so if you're looking for instant gratification, this probably isn't the place to find it (unless you have an instant client base, of course).