Reselling hosting services
with a cheap dedicated server

Web hosting reselling is one of the first ideas that come to most entrepreneur’s minds when they start looking for potential lucrative internet business possibilities. There is an increasing demand for cheap web hosting space, and therefore hosting reselling is gaining more and more reputability as a serious activity to start. Indeed, reselling web space can be a very profitable business.

There are basically two options when looking for web space to resell: you can purchase a reseller hosting plan, which is provided by most (if not all) hosting companies, or you can rent a cheap dedicated server and host your customers’ web sites within that server. Both choices have their own set of advantages and disadvantages, and I’ll briefly explain them below.

With a hosting reseller plan, you are given a certain web space and a certain transfer limit, all of that hosted in a shared server. You are basically selling your provider’s web space in behalf of them, much like an affiliate program. In some cases, you don’t have the chance to offer your own hosting plan, since you are limited to those offered by your provider. This means that if you purchase a plan that gives you 1000 Mb of hosting space, and they tell you to offer 100 Mb plans to your customers, then you are limited to selling a maximum of 10 hosting plans. You cannot sell, for instance, a 50MB plan to a customer that needs a small web site. Worse yet, many providers don’t allow you to place your name on the plans you sell, and require you to state that you are reselling hosting for them. The good thing is that your provider takes care of providing customer support and hosting maintenance themselves, so you don’t need to deal with these matters.

Reselling hosting with a cheap dedicated server, on the other hand, allows you much more flexibility. You can offer as much or as little web space to your customers as they need, since you have complete control of disk space quotas and server administration. You can set up bandwidth limits, and of course you can put your own plans’ prices. You get a global control panel that allows you to perform advanced administration of the hosted sites, and offer as many email accounts of FTP access accounts as your customers need. You will have to deal with customer support yourself, but you get to offer web hosting services under your own name, thus you will be building your own business and not just contributing to your provider’s growth, which means that all the reputability you build will be yours and only yours. Additionally, if a problem arises and you must move your customers’ web sites to another cheap dedicated server, you can do it with little or no hassles at all, and sometimes transparently, so your customers won’t even know they have switched servers.

Taking a look into both options, the immediate conclusion is clear: getting a reseller hosting plan can allow you to be offering hosting space in no time, but you will highly depend on your provider and you will make much less money. On the other hand, offering hosting space with a cheap dedicated server is a more robust and flexible option for serious entrepreneurs, and can lead to gaining your customers’ trust and increasing your own company’s reputability.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and reselling cheap dedicated server hosting may seem harder, but will prove to be the best decision you can make for your business.

To your success!

Henry C. Walsh
Dedicated Server Advisor Contributor