Reselling Hosting

Hey BH's

I'm looking to get into the hosting business.
ATM I'm considering purchasing a reseller hosting account.
I need to know what the average webpage consumes in terms of bandwith
on a monthly basis.

I'm looking to acquire 600 clients within the first year, targeted market is more
residential then commercial. Can someone with experience in reselling hosting
let me know what type of package I should purchase (Disk space and bandwith wise)??

Your help is very much appreciated
Regards

Best idea is to give them free sites that are under 100Kb in size, then you will consume less bandwidth. I'm also looking for a reliable service.

Seriously?

Alright, there is no WAY for you to know how much bandwidth a website is going to consume. You don't know what your "clients" are putting on their websites nor how much traffic they get. Trying to figure that out before you start is a useless endeavor.

If you are starting with a reseller package, then start with a small reseller account. You can always upgrade a reseller account without any difficulty. This way you dont have to care what your clients are doing. You just upgrade accordingly as you need more resources. Sort out your package setup as well. Based on your reseller package, figure out what kind of packages you want to offer, and how many of them can fit before you need to upgrade. This will help with your pricing as well.
600 clients is a lot. Its a crazy market. If you have a niche though and a good hook you can do it.

Do NOT go for unlimited anything. It doesn't exist and any host offering that is off their rocker.

You should first write out your packages, then find a good list of reseller packages, then figure out how many clients you can have on each package. Your much better of just getting a vps/dedicated server in the first month because when that server is full up with clients, buy another. Hosting isn't a very profitable market anymore, it's flooded with poorly managed companies. I'd suggest you buy a company which isn't making any profit, but is still running smoothly and not losing money.

I agree with wired mom. Any company that offers unlimited diskspace is a fraud. Yes I am including Hostgator as a fraud.

I highly recommend a VPS though. That is my personal exp. A VPS then ease your way into a dedi.

Also crazy market ? NAH if you do the usual advertisement jingle yeah it is tough as dog dirt. If you advertise outside the box it is easy. VERY EASY to get 600 clients within a year. Just think outside the box. Here is a suggestion.

Make a deal with siteflippers on Ebay or Sitepoint. Start flipping newbie sites. To reach your goal you will have to list at least 10 sites a day. I say 10 because not all the sites will sell. That is why I suggest cutting a deal with a site flipper it is probably the easiest option. You will loose money before you see profit. That is how hosting works. I think I loose 1k a month in return for about 20 clients that pay me 10.00 a month. Now that 1k will be recoverable over time. But that should give you a picture of what you are dealing with.

Find a siteflipper offer them a deal I highly recommend it . Unless you have 1k or more to loose every month.

I'm going on the idea that most personal and small business websites don't usually consume more then 1G in bandwith on a montly basis, please correct me if this figure isn't accurate.

And Alex I agree with you that alot of Hosts mismanage their operations and provide poor customer support, but this is an area that one should push to improve with their business.

LoL and yeah, you'd have to be stupid to buy into the "Unlimited" space and bandwith gimmick.

Thanks Everybody

I am with Pugmarks and have been for along time. I have no issues with them other than my ex wife sending in complaints about the server and filing violation of terms of use.

Can anyone suggest a Linux based user friendly company that will not hassle me over content. If they are offshore it is even better.

Then will not have to mess with the US laws

[email protected]

Thanks

Can i get the server configs and the rates.

While I agree that there is no UNLIMITED things, but why should we bother on this. All what they saying is: put whatever you like on your space and run whatever you want with our TOS but do not exceed our %25 of the cpu usage.

We can not say all the companies who offer UNLIMITED spaces are not good because most of the major US companies started to offering it anyway ....

get yourself a dedi from the start, then your first customers who signup will be awestruck at its performance and word of mouth will spread that you have seriously fast hosting and in turn youll grow faster, read my other posts, youll know who i recommend already, get yourself a nice quad core box, 4gig of ram, hardware raid1 with cpanel on it and your set, your not going to have to make people redelegate at a later point blahblah

YES! we all know the unlimited thing is pure bullshit - what they really mean is that it is unmetered. Most of them are fine until you do a product launch and dump a heap of traffic on there server all at once. I have a few unlimited accounts with no problems.

The biggest problem with hosts is most have lousey customer service. Try first by sending a email with a question. Here is a email that I sent...

"I run a membership site - All members double opt-in and pay $20 month. I have only had one spam complaint in all the time online - it came from a paying member who claimed that they got two emails when I sent a update email. I had the whole site deleted without question. Then the host apoligised later. If I can prove, I have not sent a spam email and that it is a members update - will you still delete my account without question?"

Most will not bother to reply at all - so you can cross them off. About 1 in 20 will.

Do a google search on any particular hosting company and see if there are any complaints online about them. One thing to check is that they are an establish company and are not resellers themselves. There are some that build a client base then sell them off. I got burned with hosty.net a while ago, they sold hosting accounts to ISPhosting which is a terrible company. So there are two to stay away from. Hostgator is okay.

There is still a lot to be made with hosting small business websites, if you manage them for them, you can get about $50-80mth. They use little bandwith, not a lot of space so you should be sweet.