I'm thinking about reselling. But how is the market?

I know there is a lot of competition.

But it's still possible to start and make some money, right?

Or do you feel it's too late...

Thanks,

Alex

Well
Based on the experiences of our resellers they are finding it hard to compete.
Many have gone over to companies offering 1GB space for $25 per month deals.

The problem is that the hosting is a monor part of the costs.

We just finished our year end and turned over about $500,000
My salary (the profit) is less than 10% of that.
The cost of running a business are very high especially on the marketing side.
And this is getting worse as the market becomes more saturated and demand flattens out.

The resellers who are making good money are actually designers who are setting up sites for people as they can charge quite high prices for the hosting element.
Many of them are targetting local businesses.

Gordon

Thank you for your answer. :)

I was thinking about focusing on a niche market.

See, here in Belgium, hosting is very expensive.

I could probably beat the local competition with a cheaper offer.


Anyway, I'm far from being ready... This is step 1, just thinking about it.

I think you're on the right track. Providing services to a local market is always the better thing to do, That's what I've been doing for the past few years and IMO you can definetly make more money. Also, when you're a local provider, you can provide better individual support.

Good luck with everything...:cartman:

Originally posted by alexvgtb
I was thinking about focusing on a niche market.

That's the best way to go. We've looked through some of our resellers' own forums, and in their own target markets they're doing well.

From groups of Mayasian graphic design students to British mountainbikers...they structure their prices according to their market, and offer a good service on an appropriate scale.

It's all there Alex, and it certainly isn't too late.

Cheers

Gary

The way I’ve always seen the hosting business is 2 main categories… First you have the general webmasters, many of them come to sites like WHT, they’re pretty informed, know what they want and pretty much can get more space/bandwidth for $20 than most resellers can offer for twice that. On the other side, you have the small business owners, people with a simple site and a few subpages who might not even need email on their domain. While this second group uses far less resources than the first, they are often willing to pay far more for the service as they really don’t know any better but more importantly don’t mind paying more for a host they like. From this point the market spreads into an infinite number of sub groups who like more bandwidth, more pop email accounts, 24x7 support, etc…

The goal for any host and any reseller should be to figure out your target client. In the case of resellers the number of potential clients is cut down given the reseller’s own costs, server access and so forth. Once you have isolated your target audience you should make your business name, website and advertisements target this group of clients. For example, when I se a reseller using the name “BandwidthWithLotsofSpaceForCheap” (example only) but in truth their largest plan comes with 2.5gigs of bandwidth a month and $10 for extra bandwidth… they have completely missed the boat.

Going back to my original point… resellers and the reseller business still have a HUGE opportunity to get the right clients because these clients rarely seem to care who it is they’re hosting with so long as the host gives what they want. Just this week a client who I did some programming for decided to switch hosts because his old host (a reseller) could not get a perl module (DBI) working properly. When he asked me for a new host, I listed off a short number of companies I had worked with or found on these forums and happened to like. This got me to thinking… if this client would easily pay $20 a month for a basic hosting package (that’s about what he spent and now spends) then any reseller, including myself (If I had the desire to deal with reselling) could make a killing off this type of client. The more I thought about it the more I realized just how many of these small business owner type client I’ve had over there years… all of whom paid someone a good deal for what is in our “webmaster” terms very little hosting.

So, after all of that rambling here are my final thoughts for you on reselling…. First off, stick to your target clients, big hosts will beat you on high end users so find smaller clients be it online (hard to find perhaps) or locally. Don’t expect to start living off your reseller profits and don’t expect to get 50 clients in a week but at the same time, never ignore your handful of clients, they’re easy income and will easily leave you. Hosting is the #1 ‘net market this year… right up there with porn… that means thousands of people every dya, month, year, etc… look for and buy hosting, some want every feature under the sun but others, many others, want a reliable place to put their website, they don’t really care who it’s with or how many thousands of email aliases they can get so long as they’re website stays up and they can get a hold of you when they have a question.

Good luck.

I think that hosting companies should take resellers more seriously and not allow any old person to resale webspace...

Why , because something mission critical deserves a host that can manage it and provide uptime, support, and anything else required...

All these little resellers paying for nice sites are just making everyone think ill of hosting companies, when in fact its just that there are so many underqualified people selling hosting...