A Reseller Hosting business is an excellent way to start your own web hosting business and earn an additional source of recurring income. It allows you to sell customized hosting plans to your customers at a highly competitive price.
There are several hosting providers that offer Reseller Hosting plans guaranteeing uptime, flexibility, white-label service, and more. But as you explore your options, you need to take time to ask the right questions to the hosting company to narrow down your options and make the best decision.
In this article, we’ll talk about those critical questions you need to ask your Reseller Hosting provider to make your purchase decision easy and more efficient. Before we begin, let’s understand more about this hosting service.
What is Reseller Hosting?
Reseller Hosting is a business where you buy bulk server space and resources. Instead of using these resources to power your website, you re-sell or re-rent them to your customers as your own hosting plans. You don’t have to own or maintain server hardware; instead, you just re-rent server resources. The hosting company owns and maintains the hardware.
The market for Reseller Hosting exists because people are willing to pay for a more personalised, customisable hosting solution with greater customer support and handholding.
Questions You Should Ask Your Reseller Hosting Account Provider
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What is their server uptime?
Uptime is a unit used to measure the reliability of a server. It’s a measure of how long a server stayed online before crashing, for whatever reason or duration. If a company’s server often crashes, so will your customers’ websites.
Enquire about uptime and note that anything that’s less than 99.9% is not great. If your customers’ websites keep crashing, it’s only a matter of time before they leave for greener pastures.
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Do they offer white label products and services?
When you run a Reseller Hosting business, it’s natural to want to brand your business, products, and services. Also, you might not want to do business with some other company’s name attached to all your products.
Hosting companies offer white label Reseller Hosting plans if that’s the case. A white label plan comes with no branding of the hosting company in any place. You can use your company’s name and brand the management dashboard, websites, servers, plans — everything.
The hosting company should offer white label plans if you want to use your name and brand for your Reseller Hosting business.
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What is the operating system that they offer?
There are only two options here — Linux and Windows. Both form an excellent platform for a Reseller Hosting business. However, both have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. Additionally, some applications and software work on a certain operating system alone.
When you’re starting a Reseller Hosting business, you need to be pretty clear on what operating system you’re going to host it on. Linux is the default choice for most people. However, Windows Reseller Hosting offers its own set of advantages too.
If a company offers Linux Hosting, inquire about the distro that they use. From Debian to CentOS, there are a lot of Linux distros in use. If you plan on using this hosting company for a long time, it might be a good idea to get familiar with the particular distro that your hosting company offers.
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Do they offer the best hosting management software?
If you’re looking at Linux Hosting, the best management tool in the business is cPanel for a website owner. For a Reseller Hosting provider, it’s WHM [Web Host Manager]. These are top-of-the-line applications that make life very easy for a Reseller Hosting provider.
Make sure that the hosting company that you choose offers these management tools. If you prefer other tools, ask the hosting company if they support those tools.
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How is the customer support?
Irrespective of how good you are and how much experience you have, you’ll have to turn to customer support at some point in time. If you’re new, you’ll need support all the more. So, make sure that you enquire thoroughly about the customer support that your hosting company offers.
At the very least, your hosting company should have at least two ways to get in touch with them. Email, chatbots, social media, phones — you should have at least two of these. Phone support, of course, is a bonus, especially if it’s round the clock.
Apart from the modes of support offered, also ask for how long it usually takes for them to get back to you. Finally, verify if this could be true using independent review websites.
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How easy or difficult is it to scale the resources?
As you get more established as a business and get more customers, you’ll want to expand your business. You may want to offer other plans, catering to a different niche — irrespective of what your reasoning is, you’re going to need more resources, including RAM, CPU cores, and storage.
Ask your web hosting company if they support scaling and, if so, what the process is. With good hosting companies, the process is quite simple. You just click a few buttons, and within minutes resources are provisioned for you. Unfortunately, it’s not the same with all companies, and it’s important to know this before you sign up for a Reseller Hosting plan with a company.
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Do they offer an application that’ll help you install software easily?
This mostly applies to Linux hosting, of course. One of the reasons that a lot of people take up a Reseller Hosting business is because you don’t need technical knowledge about Linux. You don’t have to understand coding.
One of the reasons that’s possible is applications like Softaculous that allow you to install applications with a single click like you would do on a home PC. These application installers will make life much easier for you because you won’t have to access the Linux terminal to install an application.
You can just use an application installer, and it’ll do everything that needs to be done without any human intervention. If you’re new to Reseller Hosting and aren’t an expert on hosting and Linux, this should be a must-have.
Conclusion
Reseller Hosting is a viable business model that a lot of people are now taking up. In addition, the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic has meant that more and more businesses are going online and opening new websites. This, if you’re looking to start a Reseller Hosting business, is a great time to begin.
At HostGator, we offer 99.9% uptime, seamless upgrades, 24/7 expert support, white-label, and more with our Reseller Web Hosting plans. So, opt for our reliable and cost-effective services to grow your hosting business and maximise sales and revenue.
