My Own Webhosting Service

I was on the look-out for a webhost that will provide me around 300-500 gigabytes of bandwidth because I intend to stream audio and video files aswell as offer them for download to my website visitors.
Anyway, tonight I was thinking that maybe I should seriously think about getting into reselling webhosting because that way I can not only raise my website running costs each month but also make some good profits on the side.
You see, I am not working at the moment and I thought that if I can some-how start a hosting business from home and earn atleast $800/month then that would be enough for me to make a living for the time being.
Right now, I am not thinking of purchasing my own server nor acquire my own high speed internet connection. I think it’s best to sign-up to a popular reseller program and then create webhosting packages for resale purposes.
So, does anyone know of a popular reseller program out there that has been tried, tested, reviewed and proven to be to satisfaction ?
Please list the ones you recommend by ranking the best ones starting from the top going down to least best aswell as provide details why you recommend these.
Also, don’t forget to warn me of those that are worth avoiding by giving reasons why I should avoid them.
I would also like advice on :

1. pros and cons on re-selling hosting
2. what catches (pitfalls) I should look-out for when purchasing hosting for reselling purpose
3. what pitfalls I should look-out for when reselling webhosting to my customers
4. how much resources and what features I should make sure to get from my seller to resell to my buyers
5. what packages (how much webspaces and bandwidths) I should offer for sale at what prices
6. how I can influence you to buy hosting from me so you forget your existing hosts.

Before giving me any advice from your experiences check this website out thoroughly as you might learn some-thing new and then come-up with good advice, tips, suggestions, feed-backs for me :

http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/dedicated_vs_colocated_servers.php

I am thinking of reselling Unix/Linux hosting.

There are numerous webhosts with reseller packages - literally thousands.

Your questions are good, but also hard to answer. Many of them depend on the type of business model you wish to use. I would suggest starting off with a small and reasonable reseller package from a dependable webhost. The hardest part will be getting clients - so figure out how you're going to do this (advertising, existing clients, PPC, etc).

Once you have narrowed down your choices in terms of the reseller package, you should do some research on the types of shared hosting packages people are selling. So, if you have 1gb of space and 15 gb of bandwidth per month, you can figure out whether you want 10 x 100mb and 1.5 gb clients or 100 x 10 mb and 150mb clients, etc.

Apart from that, you should also consider the costs of supporting the clients, any software you may need (helpdesk software, forum), automation tools (clientexec, whmautopilot) you may require and overhead costs relating to payment processing.

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Web Hosting Tips | Career Advice

Hi

I can only throw in my own experience but I have never tried anybody else for comparison to be honest.

I went with http://www.lypha.com and they have been excellent.
I have about 30-odd sites on my virtual server there and I have never had a noticeable problem with speed and its never gone down on me yet.

They also have different levels of reseller package at very good prices (I think).

Just get yourself a Hosting based web template and you could be away in less than a day. Lypha offer anonymous support centers so it looks to the customer as if you have a solid backbone (I guess most do this...).

There are a fwe problems.
The market is so huge and competitive that your pricing will have to be very low. This effectively means that after marketing costs your potentail profit is likely to be negligable for a long while. It might take you years to start clearing $800 a month without a lot of hard work, link catching, optimising. If you have many existing web related services you can stick your hosting service on that that will help.

Basically, dont jump into it thinking its easy money.

The best thing I would suggest is to go for a 'niche' hosting market.
You will never stick out on your pricing as there are always a thousand people who can do it cheaper. What the marketing hook is, well, tahts the trick and I will leave it in your hands !
I just use my hosting company as a very small sideline and something else to offer my domain clients. My main reason though is so I can host my own multiple websites cheaply all in one place.

Good luck.

I know this was a few months ago and my question is did you find a good reseller? I currently resell through a company call buzix and have not had a pleaseant experience and am looking for a new provider. Most of my sites are ASP (windows hosted) and have medium traffic.

I have hosted with Buzix since before they bought all of the Digihost accounts and have not had any significant issues. I have been a reseller for a good while and so I know how important it is to have a good understanding of the servers and what the company allows on their network.

I know they recently switched all of the Windows servers (with prior announcements to us) to 2003 servers and so if you coded your programs for previous versions or for other servers, you might have to make some changes in your code to get some things working.

I'm guessing that your concerns were only slight, or else you'd be telling us about what the problems are and looking for help.

As far as I'm concerned, they're a great crew and they have been around for about 10 or so years. This is definately a shock. Give them a second chance and maybe beef up your 2003 and Plesk knowledge if that is the pitfall. That should make your situation better.

My intention was not to bash your company; I should have left the name out to be honest. I am sure you are right about the service and that my own ignorance is causing the problems. It seems the longer I am with your company the more comfortable it becomes and the more familiar I am with your systems. Please disregard my earlier comments.

No sweat. Its not "my" company, and I've been doing business with them for a long time. They tend to be very helpful if you need answers, and like I said I've have no issues worth speaking of over say 6 or so years.

For everyone else, www.buzix.com is who we're talking about. Host there and, make your own opinion...