How can I start a HOSTING Business?

Hey, I am thinking about building a hosting business, for example - cloud hosting, VPS, etc. It just adds recurring cash flow, which makes all the other things way much easier, because then you can actually predict the cash flow for the next month, quarter, year, etc.

I am particularly looking into reselling other hosting services.

How can I start this? And what are some ways/places/resources I can learn it? I am absolutely new to this, so would highly appreciate any suggestions.

RealDaddy said:

It just adds recurring cash flow, which makes all the other things way much easier, because then you can actually predict the cash flow for the next month, quarter, year, etc.

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Have you done any kind of research to back this up?
Hosting is an overcrowded industry. With so many players having their own setup and low prices how do you plan on marketing your services?
With your markup, your prices are not going to be too competitive.
Hope you do your homework before taking the plunge.

NirvanaWolf said:

Have you done any kind of research to back this up?
Hosting is an overcrowded industry. With so many players having their own setup and low prices how do you plan on marketing your services?
With your markup, your prices are not going to be too competitive.
Hope you do your homework before taking the plunge.

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Hmm, I was thinking the same. It seems overcrowded. And thanks for the insight

Namehero made a great in-depth video on setting up a reseller package with them. And there is also a forum made for web hosting where you can get more resources ( quick google search can get you there since we cant share other foums here).

NirvanaWolf said:

Have you done any kind of research to back this up?
Hosting is an overcrowded industry. With so many players having their own setup and low prices how do you plan on marketing your services?
With your markup, your prices are not going to be too competitive.
Hope you do your homework before taking the plunge.

Click to expand...

+1
I consider a waste of time in business and a big headache, for just a few bucks, to run a small hosting company. I provide hosting for some of my clients (I select each of them, and make sure they will not be a headache in the future), but I don't provide hosting for the public.

The reseller option is good. Just make sure the support team (provided by the company from where you'll buy the reseller plan) is good enough (you don't want to solve x/y issue at 3 A.M. ). If you want to sell locally, make sure the server location is near you (your clients) - You don't need a server located in Toronto, and to sell hosting for people from South Africa or Australia.

There are a lot of companies who provide reseller feature. Just read the reviews (start with the 1 stars and so) and select the most competitive one.
Pay attention to the following aspects:
1. vCore is not Core CPU.
2. Innodes limit.
3. Choose SSD or, even better, NVMe.
4. Support team - again, this is very important.
5. To be 100% white labeled.
6. Possibility to oversell.
7. Dedicate IP(s) and private NS.
8. Licenses - In the ideal scenario, you'll get a number of cPanel licenses included in the monthly budget. Even better if the company give you a free WHMCS license.

--
Later edit: Don't forget: If something goes wrong, you'll deal with the client, not the company from where you bought the reseller account.

Cheers!

tbh creating and management isn’t an issue, it is marketing and promotion that is an issue.

Just look at the cpc of terms, it is as hard as weight loss niche.

Only work around this is when you are trying to onboarding new blogger .

You can use all the keyword research tips you keep posting threads about and build out niche orientated seo optimised sites.

1. Find Your Niche - In the web hosting business, competition is fierce, but you can still target a specific niche group and start growing from there.

2. Research Competitors - You want to separate yourself even more from other hosting companies within your niche, so Analyzing your competitors is the best strategy for discovering ways to outdo them.

3. Choose Your Server Type -

Dedicated Server - Is dedicated to a single client.

Dedicated Cloud Server - Is a great tool because you don’t have to worry about scaling your server or infrastructure even with an unexpected spike in traffic, performance remains consistent.

VPS - A Virtual Private Server is a single server that is partitioned to suit multiple systems.

4. Create a Business Model - For Hosting a business You'll need to fine-tune the details of your niche marketing as well as invent your brand.

5. Have a Customer Service and Support - it's so important that it's practically a necessity and consider handling customer service and support as part of your hosting business.

Simply too much competition imo
Chat support is another headache

A niche blog targetting the web hosting industry will make you more money than the actual web hosting website you plan to start.

However, you can still get some clients starting with forums.

For example, you offer them a .com on yearly purchases. A .com domain will cost you around $6 from wild west domains for example. You charge $50/yeah for webhosting.

It's not a great business model, but it's a fast way to get some clients rolling.

Client acquisition through Adwords is expensive. In 2015 I was paying roughly $90 for a conversion and was making only $64 net yearly profit. It adds up if you rely on word of mouth from existing clients to get new ones. That's how the big players ( with huge budgets ) start out.

Hostgator for example affords to pay you %100 of their profits as an affiliate. This is because they are certain of recurring clients, and also of friendly advertising.

Another path you can go on is selling $1 webhosting packages, suitable for PBN owners, small project owners, etc.
You pay $20 for a reseller package, and bank $100, leaving you with $80 profit.

Regardless, it's going to cost you some money. Without some form of initial investment, you are going to have a hard time

Have a look at service providers you can outsource support to like Bobcares. There are other web host support services out there. If I were to do this (and I've looked into years ago) I wouldn't try offering cheap $1/m or $5/year plans because you will end up with a lot of cheap customers with no money and full of complaints.

I would focus on small-medium size businesses where you could make $50-$100+ monthly per customer depending on their needs. I use Runcloud to manage the server and then use Vultr/Digitalocean to host the website. If they want/need support then I charge them for my time, minimum 30 minutes. If a client wants their own custom email using their own domains I resell them a Google or Microsoft account. Once you get them onboard this opens the door to upsell them website redesigns, seo, and countless other marketing services.

You can also have a look at WHMCS that makes reselling extremely easy.

As with most things, your success will come down to marketing and how well you promote your service to attract customers.

Try to start from your local country. This business is a bit compeitative. So find your USP and promote it. best wishes.

If recurring revenue is your main reason for picking hosting, you have better options available. Maybe a white-label SAAS?

With hosting you won't be able to compete on the price, and not on support/quality either (judging by your post).

If you have to ask here, just don´t do it. Host your own clients in a combined hosting-managed-website package instead, much more money. Hosting is a nightmare if you don´t have the financial muscles to shove in to it.

lots of good info weighing in here
for what its worth i assume 90% of the hosting guys i see online are simply whitelabel resellers for someone else. they get a commission per sale and the real big players handle everything else on the backend from maintaining the hardware to handling the support. you just basically send links to your "website" which is really just the front end of a big affiliate link that pays you recurring billing. but i think you know that already.

so how to get started. probably googling "best hosting reseller blackhatworld" and go. long long time ago hostgator was really popular for this.

RealDaddy said:

Hey, I am thinking about building a hosting business, for example - cloud hosting, VPS, etc. It just adds recurring cash flow, which makes all the other things way much easier, because then you can actually predict the cash flow for the next month, quarter, year, etc.

I am particularly looking into reselling other hosting services.

How can I start this? And what are some ways/places/resources I can learn it? I am absolutely new to this, so would highly appreciate any suggestions.

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Depends if you have technical skills, so either go for a dedicated server or reseller package.

If you go for dedicated servers OVH is a good option. Cheap hardware and good specs, but you manage everything yourself and customer service is super basic.

So for example, if you take Advance-4 server you get 16c/32t/ 64GB RAM/ 960GB SSD for £180. You can customise and add more space.
https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/bare-metal/advance/adv-4/
If you install some hypervisor like ESXi you can create a virtual machine VPS (Windows, Linux) which you can sell for higher prices than usual web hosting especially if they have dedicated hardware resources. You can request up 256 IP addresses per server.

Or each VPS could serve multiple simple websites to use the server to the max. But margins are quite low and you have to deal with customer service, technical issues, regular backups etc.

RealDaddy said:

Hey, I am thinking about building a hosting business, for example - cloud hosting, VPS, etc. It just adds recurring cash flow, which makes all the other things way much easier, because then you can actually predict the cash flow for the next month, quarter, year, etc.

I am particularly looking into reselling other hosting services.

How can I start this? And what are some ways/places/resources I can learn it? I am absolutely new to this, so would highly appreciate any suggestions.

Click to expand...

Please do not do that... you are too nice a guy to have headaches that are out of your control.

BassTrackerBoats said:

Please do not do that... you are too nice a guy to have headaches that are out of your control.

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lol
Do you recommend any other way of building recurring revenue?

There are some hosting providers that sell whitelabelled reseller hosting services you could try.

you can get aws account with 300 dollar