Are you considering adding web hosting to the list of services you already provide to your clients, but unsure where to start or what you need? That’s understandable!
Web hosting is a technical service, and so you need to have the basics of web hosting down in order to ensure that you provide your clients with seamless, secure, and strong services.
One of the most seamless and affordable ways of venturing into the web hosting business is by setting up a Web Hosting Reseller business. With a low cost of entry and ease of management, Reseller Hosting offers an easy way to start your hosting business. Once you understand and set up a basic Hosting Reseller business, you can then purchase the tools you need to help you manage your web hosting business and your clients.
Before looking at these tools, let us look at what Reseller Hosting is.
What is Reseller Web Hosting?
Reseller Hosting is when a business uses the resources of a parent web hosting company and sells it as its own. What you are doing, essentially, is setting up your own web hosting business, by reselling web hosting features from a hosting provider. You, as the account holder, have the ability to use your allotted hard drive space and bandwidth to host websites for third parties (your clients). You can purchase the host’s services wholesale and then sell them to your clients for a profit.
If you’re a web designer, developer or even someone who works in a different field, Reseller Hosting is a great way to make some extra income. By using White Label Hosting, you can resell web hosting services under your own brand name.
All of this may sound complicated, but it’s a lot simpler than you imagine. Most web hosting companies already have the software set up through the best Reseller Hosting packages and plans. When you buy their Web Hosting Reseller business plans, you get access to different tools like cPanel, Chatbots, WHM and more.
For instance, when you sign up for Reseller Hosting you will have access to a control panel or admin console like cPanel. This is where you will find your allocated disk space and bandwidth allowance for each month. The panel will allow you to set up new accounts, create email addresses, allocate disk space and manage other typical features of web hosting.
So, let’s look at tools like cPanel that can help you create a seamless web hosting experience for your clients.
cPanel – the multi-tasking control panel
cPanel is a control panel that helps you manage a Linux hosting service. Through cPanel, you can manage administrative tasks, such as creating a website, resetting passwords, creating and managing emails, managing add-on domains, uploading and managing files, setting mail forwards and more. It allows users to manage their files with ease.
cPanel offers a simple interface and is a highly efficient tool for managing system admins. It is extremely easy to install, and its graphic interface is user friendly and highly responsive. It simplifies processes, by offering basic commands for complex functions. With cPanel, you can perform both basic and complex tasks, like the evaluation of disk space, system maintenance and backups with a few clicks.
With a range of high-end features, the cPanel control panel empowers you to host and manage an online website seamlessly. All these features are protected by antivirus, which helps ward off attacks from viruses and malware.
WHM – the perfect companion to cPanel and Hosting Resellers
WHM – or Web Host Manager – is a powerful program, which gives you administrative access to the backend of cPanel accounts. With WHM you can create a cPanel account to avail of hosting accounts. It gives you a lot of control and flexibility to manage either a large number of sites or resource-heavy websites. It gives you the ability to sell hosting services to new clients and helps you create and manage, delete or suspend multiple cPanels. It helps you assess to check or change all of your domain’s DNS zones, permission to see the server’s status, the ability to change your client’s domain names and usernames and much more.
WHMCS – the all-rounder
WHMCS (Web Host Manager Complete Solution) enables you to manage your web hosting business efficiently. It is a great tool for client management, billing and support functionality. It automates many processes, and can also be extended to other web hosting services you may offer, like web development or graphic design. With this tool, you get features like automated recurring billing, automated account creation, suspension and termination, payment tracking and statistical reports, multi-language support for email and control panel and an integrated client support centre (including support tickets) and knowledge-base.
With WHMCS, you can save time as it automates a lot of processes, like billing, making tasks like reminders, invoices or collecting payments obsolete. It is a secure and dependable solution that will scale with your business and provides steady support from its customer service team.
Chatbots – for low-cost yet efficient customer support
A chatbot is an Artificial Intelligence Software, which simulates a chat or conversation with a user via websites, messaging apps, mobile apps or through the phone. Chatbots function through two2 different tasks – uUser request analysis and returning the response.
With user request analysis, the chatbot analyses the user’s request in order to identify user intent and extract relevant information. (If it is unable to understand the user’s request and extract the right entities from it, it won’t be able to provide the right answer). This brings us to the second task – once the intent has been identified, the chatbot must respond with the appropriate answer either through a generic predefined text, a message retrieved from the knowledge base, data stored in enterprise systems and more.
Chatbots can improve your customer service considerably and enhance your customer’s experience. They also help you cut costs when setting up a customer service team.
Softaculous – install your apps in a single click
Softaculous is a commercial script library and a one-click installer. It helps automate the installation of web applications to a website and is well integrated with cPanel. With one click, you can install free/open-source applications. Softaculous gives its users access to 417 apps. When you install apps with Softaculous, it handles everything involved in the installation process (including tasks like setting up databases and setting permissions on web-viewable content). It also creates backups for the apps you have installed. With Softaculous, not only are the updates of applications faster, but they are also more frequent. You can focus on using the apps, instead of worrying about installing them.
Summing Up
Powerful tools such as the ones mentioned above can help your Web Hosting Reseller business soar. Visit HostGator’s website and check out the features of our comprehensive Reseller Hosting plans and packages, which include features like free WHM, free cPanel, excellent customer services, good disk space and bandwidth, and free WHMCS (with select plans) – all the features to get you started on your newest businesses – Reseller Web Hosting.
