Scaling your Reseller Hosting Business Properly

Look at the major web hosting companies today, and you’ll see they also offer scaled service and hosting solutions for their customers as part of their core offerings. Companies like HostGator, Site5 and GreenGeeks offer reseller hosting solutions with standardized support, data plans and features.

Independent of your long run goals for growing your reseller hosting business, establishing standardization in your hiring, technology and services is important to improving efficiency and quality. There are both technical and economic issues when it comes to finding a business model that can scale properly, and accounting for these with proper long run planning can help you find a profitable model for you.

Economics: Finding a Business Model that can Scale

When starting out as a new reseller, you’ll have a variety of costs ranging from establishing your firm (either as an LLC or S-Corp, depending on the number of investors), paying for licensing fees on your control panel, billing software and support solutions, as well as costs related to office space, hiring, taxation and legal fees. Setting up your business the right way means limiting any potential liabilities that can arise, so you should invest in quality processes, people and technology in order to start building your business.

A smart idea before launching your firm is to map out a business plan that factors in your costs, procedures and a roadmap for growth. While many hosting firms aim to offer general plans, research into the market may reveal a particular niche, such as e-Commerce, local business or media hosting is a better fit.

A proper business plan should map out a pricing, customer acquisition and growth plan that allows you to break even quickly and build profits as you add incremental users. Focusing on core, popular technologies such as LAMP can clarify your hiring and service direction. Linking your marketing model to your business growth plan can help identify where to price, market and deliver your services properly. Having a consistent message, goal and mission can clarify how you can better meet the needs of your customer base.

Technology: Working with a Data Centers that can Scale

Finding the right data center provider can offer more value for your computing needs, as well as maintaining solid client relationships over time. Earning a reputation as a reliable host requires high uptime standards, as well as successful responses to downtime events. Keeping your servers online for larger periods of time requires working with reliable data centers.  Maintaining good technical support and following best practices in terms of your technical operations can help you realize these goals. Ideally, you want to find a reseller hosting partner who can offer a seamless experience from startup to well established host.

Beginning with reseller hosting requires making smart infrastructure decisions in terms of providers and hardware. While you may be able to identify a host who meets your requirements at this very moment, a better solution is to identify a provider who can reliably scale to meet your hardware, software and configuration needs.  When selecting your data center provider you’ll want to consider their hardware quality, uptime standards (including layers of backup and security) as well as their data transfer rates.

If you are recruiting high volume clients, then you’ll need the ability to charge on demand for additional resources – hosting in a cluster gives you the luxury of on-demand computing power.  Being able to scale goes beyond maintaining data transfer speed as your inbound requests increase, and also implies you’ll be able to maintain your uptime and data reliability as you build out.

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• Top 10 Reseller Hosting Companies

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