Thread: What advice would you give to someone newer to reseller hosting?

Hi. I do a bit of freelance website work and mostly build small business websites.

In the past with clients, when it came to web and domain name hosting, I would get the client to buy their own web hosting through a provider and have to walk them through the whole process. I would then upload the website to the hosting for the client. The issues I would run into though was when the hosting would have an issue, the clients would come to me to fix their hosting issue although I'm not in charge of their hosting. So I end up coming a middle man between the client and the hosting provider. The other issue was clients were constantly screwing up their hosting renewal with their hosting company either by not seeing renewal emails or by having out of date card details. The final issue was the hosting company's offered rigid plans and clients would usually have to spend a bit on a 10gb plan and only use 1gb. On top of all this, I wasn't making money off the hosting but still had to be involved.

A while back I decided to go down the re-seller route and got some good advice and found a good provider that had a great support team. Now I'm able to make more flexible plans and affordable plans for clients, I control the renewals and so clients aren't losing their hosting due to not getting emails or having out of date cards. And now I'm able to set prices and actually make money off hosting instead of being a middle man between clients and their hosting company.

While this has a been a great change, I've had to learn all this on the fly and I really need to educate myself more on hosting as I have clients who depend on me. I was wondering what advice you'd give to someone starting out with web hosting? what things should I watch out for? I still feel like a noob with a lot of this and felt like it's time to speak to people a lot smarter than me.

Thanks

Starting with reseller is a smart plan when you are handling there website and hosting issues. to make your life much more easy you should consider WHMCS to manage all clients and the billing along with ticketing. Also, you should keep a few more points:
1. Make sure your hosting provides good support 27x7.
2. Make new packages for your reseller account and set clients as per needs. this will be automated from WHMCS
3. Backups are very important verify if you have the backup option enabled and that also should be on a different server like R1soft so it can help in disaster or hardware failure.
4. Setting clients on a fixed plan will help with not running out of disk space suddenly. This will also help you to upgrade any particular account to a bigger one or a VPS in needed.
5. Hosting is a technical field so keep learning from here or youtube or cpanel university.
6. Most important do not undersell yourself. keep price competitive but remember to factor in your time for managing all accounts and providing fast support.
7. While you grow you will find more issues and for those you can create a knowledge base in WHMCS for your client's basic ones like DNS/ Domain renewal / spamming etc
I hope it helps.

Regardless of what or how you're hosting (shared, reseller, VPS, cloud, dedicated), backups should always be your #1 priority.

Originally Posted by ava32

Hi. I do a bit of freelance website work and mostly build small business websites.

In the past with clients, when it came to web and domain name hosting, I would get the client to buy their own web hosting through a provider and have to walk them through the whole process. I would then upload the website to the hosting for the client. The issues I would run into though was when the hosting would have an issue, the clients would come to me to fix their hosting issue although I'm not in charge of their hosting. So I end up coming a middle man between the client and the hosting provider. The other issue was clients were constantly screwing up their hosting renewal with their hosting company either by not seeing renewal emails or by having out of date card details. The final issue was the hosting company's offered rigid plans and clients would usually have to spend a bit on a 10gb plan and only use 1gb. On top of all this, I wasn't making money off the hosting but still had to be involved.

A while back I decided to go down the re-seller route and got some good advice and found a good provider that had a great support team. Now I'm able to make more flexible plans and affordable plans for clients, I control the renewals and so clients aren't losing their hosting due to not getting emails or having out of date cards. And now I'm able to set prices and actually make money off hosting instead of being a middle man between clients and their hosting company.

While this has a been a great change, I've had to learn all this on the fly and I really need to educate myself more on hosting as I have clients who depend on me. I was wondering what advice you'd give to someone starting out with web hosting? what things should I watch out for? I still feel like a noob with a lot of this and felt like it's time to speak to people a lot smarter than me.

Thanks

You made a smart move by switching to reseller hosting. This will reduce a lot of hassle for you.

1. Look for 24/7 support

Its great you found a good hosting provider. Make sure they are providing 24/7 livechat or other spport. This is very very important because in case of any emergencies you must be able to contact them. If its a good support team they will fix things quickly. And they must be responsive too. This will save a lot of stress for you.

2.Offer Regular Backups

Even if your provider offers backups still i suggest you to maintain regular backup. This will give you peace of mind and also if something goes wrong on your hosting providers end,this will save you .

3. See if you can offer extra value

If you can provide services like domain registration, free ssl, backups . These dont cost much but will make you look professional and clients would stick with you.

4. Make sure your provider is helpful

Some hostin providers help their clients if they are new or unsure about something. If your hosting provider is one of them its great , you can ask them and learn.

5. Learn the basics of server manaement

There are many youtube videos try learning the basics of server management (like cPanel, WHM, or how to troubleshoot common issues). This will make you more confident.

6. Make sure your not over loading the server

If you add many clients to cut cost and if one of your customer is having heavy traffic it will slow down everyones site. So always monitor server usage and if needed upgrade.

Originally Posted by SimpleSonic

Regardless of what or how you're hosting (shared, reseller, VPS, cloud, dedicated), backups should always be your #1 priority.

Thanks for your reply. Currently they have the Acronis backup system which does a backup each hour every day. I'm hoping this will be good enough. I sometimes wonder if I should try and do backups locally. Or if this will be overkill.

Originally Posted by ava32

Thanks for your reply. Currently they have the Acronis backup system which does a backup each hour every day. I'm hoping this will be good enough. I sometimes wonder if I should try and do backups locally. Or if this will be overkill.

Doing backups locally in addition to remote can seriously improve restore times, so it can be quite useful if you have the extra space for storage.

There is really no such thing as overkill when it comes to backups.

Originally Posted by SimpleSonic

Doing backups locally in addition to remote can seriously improve restore times, so it can be quite useful if you have the extra space for storage.

There is really no such thing as overkill when it comes to backups.

What's the best method to do local hosting with multiple websites?