Webhosting

[ianh21]

hi

i would like to get into webhosting and reselling space. i spoke with another person who does this soely and said it's bringing in a good amount of money.

i have an unlimited hosting plan with webhostingpad and found there service to be good and they have helped me out.

i have a main domain on the plan already which is my brother in laws wordpress site. is it easy to add sub domains but be completely seperate to his website address or will it always be a subsidiary domain of his main site?

anyone have experience as i think there is a good amount of revenue to make here.

 

[TenYardFight]

Be sure your server has WHM so you can manage multiple cpanel accounts easily. No, there is no money in offering this to the general public and competing on price. I know one forum member here has a large hosting business, so he can correct me if I am wrong.

I resell hosting at a significant premium. The only people that buy it are my existing clients.

It's really a lot to manage. Even selling it at a premium, and have lots of customers on it, I estimate the effort yields us about 600 USD per month and takes us 6 hours to manage. Makes it just barely worth it, as we are getting our hourly rate.

 

[ianh21]

i think there is scope if i can get the cpanels all setup well and seperate and sell just the hosting. managing would be another charge. i'd be happy to receive £600 a mth through unlimited hosting. i'll look into it but any other help/tips/advice would be great.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

I had a lot of downtime with WebHostingPad when I had my site their. I have since moved my site to ASmallOrange which is all SSD storage and have had much better support and 100% uptime so far. The cost is about $10 more a year for my singe site so it was worth it for me.

 

[fencepost]

I'm concerned about this "unlimited hosting plan with webhostingpad" - do you mean you have a $1.99 account and want to take advantage of being able to host multiple domains on it? If so, you're likely going to run up against their terms of service, plus a variety of other issues. Suddenly getting your account (and all of your customer sites) yanked out from under you could make for a painful day.

I sell webhosting to customers that I'm otherwise serving, but that's with the understanding that if they need me to do much with it (site changes, etc.) I'm going to be charging them hourly rate for it. I make a little money off the difference between what I charge for hosting and what I pay for my reseller account at hostmatters.com, but that basically covers the time I spend on occasional minor items.

Actually making a living or significant money off of webhosting itself is likely to be more headache than you anticipate. It's not a high-margin business. I'll use as an example a bunch of website developers I know, who mostly avoid doing hosting - the expectation is that if you're hosting it and something goes wrong the customer expects YOU to fix it, and even spending 15 minutes explaining to them that no, you have no influence over whether Google rejects email from the server means that you've lost money on that customer for the month, perhaps longer.

 

[ianh21]

yes i appreciate that. i have brought it up with them, basically i purchased a five yr plan with them for my brother in laws website. its a wordpress site and i do his admin as well on the site - he has access and does stuff but often messes it up. i have my own wordpress site which i'm getting my head around still.

anyway, i asked webhosting pad and they said multiple sites is no problem but i don;t think it has the WHM site but i take on others info re: webhosting pad. whilst i've no issue, i may get a seperate reseller account elsewhere.

 

[allstarit]

I have a WHM/CPANEL reseller account and use WHMCS to handle billing and automation.
I linked WHMCS to my Domain Registrar so basically a customer can purchase a domain with hosting. It will register domain, take payment and the setup cpanel account on my WHM account.
Fully automated which is really good.
Client gets one bill from me and can access registrar console and Cpanel all from one logon.

Im same as TenYardFight really only sell to existing clients. Anyone can purchase off my site but mostly used with exisiting clients.

Here is my WHMCS portal
Http://accounts.allstarcomputers.com.au if you want to see how it looks.

I also add my managed services, backups, office 365 services into this portal and use it as a ticketing system too.

 

[ianh21]

thats really good, did you design the website?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

We have a wholesale reseller account with RackSpace.
We sell website hosting to our clients...we don't design website, just offer our clients a place to host it. We do it as part of offering complete packages, not as a money maker. Plus our wholesale account with RackSpace gets us a ton of other things that we use (DNS control panel, basic e-mail accounts for cheapie clients ,etc). So one of our managed services that we sell our clients is the Domain Management. We maintain their domain registration, as well as a place to hang a basic website, basic e-mail accounts, and importantly...DNS control panel management...for $250/yr per domain name. (price goes down with multiple domains)

Website hosting itself isn't a money maker unless you're doing wicked high volumes. It would be like trying to compete with the 20 dollar per year unlimited offsite backup plans out there. For our time and effort...not worth it for just a couple of pennies. But we offer it for some clients that need it.

 

[allstarit]

thats really good, did you design the website?

Not sure if you referring to my site but i dont see any other links to sites so i think you are?

the accounts.allstarcomputers.com.au no- this is the default website it comes with on WHMCS version 6
I used to have a bridge between WHMCS and WordPress but it kept breaking with updates ect so i split it to a subdomain.

For allstarcomputers.com.au i designed (with avada theme) - not the best but im no web designer.

 

[jzukerman]

To do it right here's what I recommend:

1x VPS with WHM/cPanel license and a static (non-shared) IP address for SSL certificate. For your webhosting company website, primary DNS server, and WHMCS install. 1GB RAM and 20GB space is usually more than enough.
1x WHMCS license, for automated billing and support, can be included with the above VPS.
1x SSL certificate for the WHMCS installation. I use Comodo SingleDomain SSL certs for this.
1x SSL certificate for the cPanel install that your clients (and you) will use. Same as above.
1x VPS or dedicated server with WHM/cPanel license, for your clients websites. 2GB RAM and 50GB or more space is a good place to start.
1x (or more) VPS for secondary DNS and data backup. You can use the free cPanel DNS-Only license here and save a few bucks. 512MB RAM or more is all you need here. Plenty of disk space though for backups, preferably daily/weekly/monthly backups.
1x backup script of your choice. I use two, WHMEasyBackup and cpRemote.
1x Domain Reseller Account of your choice. I use NetEarthOne. Could also use Namecheap (which I use for reselling SSL certificates).
1x Payment processor of your choice. I use Paypal non-monthly fee one. Though some of my clients pay by check which WHMCS can handle built in.

That's off the top of my head, going from my memory of what how I operate my own webhosting services. As others have said, I offer it as a valued-added service for my existing IT clients and don't actively market it to general public.

 

[jzukerman]

One license I forgot to add is Cloudlinux, for security and better management of server resources. But that seems to only work on dedicated servers. I don't think that can be installed on a VPS (or at least not a OpenVZ powered VPS).

 

[SoloCon]

Been in the hosting world for 15+ years. I only host the site if I design the site unless someone needs off site "backups" (to a point). I do have a GoDaddy reseller package that allows me to create my own prices and not have to support the general public who buy off my site. they call the 800 number listed which is white labeled and a GoDaddy agents get the call, handles issues/email/networking/billing/ insert problem here 24 hours a day.

They also try to "upsell" my customers based off the products I sell on my site at my asking price. I also use comodo for my SSL's 9No through GoDaddy) of which I get for $23.00 for 3 years.

 

[ianh21]

thanks all, certainly some food for thought there and some decisions to be made.

allstar: yes i was referring to your sites.

i will take all your information and advice and build a package and then see if i have the time to do it.

 

[Bigtek1]

I would like to make a suggestion for those who are looking to wade into the hosting and web design field.

I would suggest you look into the LightCMS Developer program. It is a CMS system that is a very easy to use and modify, it is has a template system with templates to modify but you can also build your own sites (much more complicated than their basic template system). It has a built in shopping cart system and modules you can chose and place on the page to structure you site with. It has a central login with all accounts showing up in that main screen and you choose which account to edit from there. My first 2 ecommerce sites were with lightcms and they are still running strong.
I have built simple 5 page sites from registaring domains to setting up emails and a template site in one day
with this program.

When I came to the point iun my business I needed to add web development I started with them. It is easy to use, modify and maintain with very little effort. It does how every have a few draw backs, It has no email system and that means you will need to registary your domain in one place and point to the website.
You can do this with any hosting company like GoDaddy etc. With the hosting company you can registar your domain and maintain it and also then buy email hosting if needed. Now if your a knowledgeable webmaster this is probably not the system for you. However accroding to the needs of the site I still put many of my new small customers on this program.

But for the ones here with little or no programming skill it is a solution for you while you learn other skills like WordPress or Drupal. It allowed me to get into the business and then allowed me the time to master other skills so that I now have a decent client list going and growing every month.
Just a suggestion and I hope it is useful to someone that was in my shoes 2 yrs ago.

 

[Choppie]

I know this is an OLD thread, but the topic is still very relevant......sorry...

I have had a hosting account with Host Excellence for the past 12 years. Unlimited domains/MySQL/email/ for about 190 dollars per year. Never a single problem, ever. Support was on the phone in 15 seconds, helping me with installing Squirrel Mail, and that kind of stuff, also upgrading PHP to get a self hosted program to run when I needed it. I've got about 18 domains running now, and I charge for about 5 of them, 120 per year, it pays for my hosting. Well things started going down hill FAST in the last year. 2 days to install an SSL Cert, and today, after paying for a renewal CERT....two days ago...its still not installed! They were bought out by Site5, google it, its a nightmare! They are ALL owned by EIG or mostly, google that too. I'm now closing my account with them, and looking for a new web hosting provider. Looks like I'm going with IonBlade, part of the Comodo group which was calling my client to make sure they knew their CERT was expired, which is how I found all this out. Nightmare unfolding .... Paid for the CERT renewal 2 days ago, Host Excellence has dropped the ball, this is a simple 3 mouse click process and it's still not installed.....But the good is, I may have a much better hosting service because my hand was forced to make changes.....

 

[CLC]

Everyone dogs on iPage but I've used them for years with no problems, they have a profitable reseller program you can get into rather cheap.

 

[fencepost]

The pricing you're getting (and clearly charging) is pretty low, but I've been using Hosting Matters (hostmatters.com) for... hm... Probably 16 or 17 years now and been quite pleased with them. I have a reseller account and a fairly small number of domains, but it sounds like you do as well.

I've considered just getting a smallish instance somewhere that included cPanel with their plans, (Wiredtree when they were around, maybe Digital Ocean or Linode, etc.) but frankly I'm just as happy to not have to deal with patching and monitoring security lists for things that are only used in that one place.

The same people have owned and operated it the entire time I've dealt with them, including mostly the same staff. They're hosted in a Peak10 (now Flexential?) data center in Jacksonville, and I think Annette at least lives within a mile or two of it.