Don’t be afraid to be a reseller, be proud!

photo credit: irontec

Many times when someone (or a group of someones) decide to start a web hosting business, they opt to at least begin on a reseller web hosting plan. Why? Because it’s cheaper. And cheaper makes great sense (and cents!). Especially in today’s economy, there’s lots of concern in regards to controlling costs. It’s not only the current trend, the financially sound thing to do!

But that is only a part of the equation. Many reseller hosting providers offer more than just space and bandwidth. Quite often, we can get clients deals on billing software licenses, web design services, web development services, and much much more. Being a reseller opens up a network of tools and utilities to you that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

We offer a pretty standard hosting setup. Shared hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated servers. We focus on quality of service over features and specialty configurations, and have a reputation for providing consistant levels of high quality services. This lets our resellers come in and offer services on top of ours, be it blog hosting, or shopping cart systems for niche markets, areas we are not going to enter, because our main focus is on providing a stable platform for our clients to build theirs off of.

They can then say “We are resellers of WebOnce Technologies hosting services” and not feel bad about it. Their target market wouldn’t then come to our site and sign up with us, because we do not offer the value added toolsets that our resellers can focus on.

What I’m really getting at is, there’s a right way, and a wrong way, to go about reseller hosting, and if you cannot tell your clients who your upstream providers are, perhaps you might look at revising your business plan to accomodate the ability to have full disclosure. There’s no shame in having upstream providers, and heck, unless you are part of the backbone of the Internet, you are a reseller. It’s just a matter of what level you start at.

So, the next time someone asks if you’re a reseller, tell them YES! If they ask why, say you’re much better at growing their business than managing servers. Does the grocery store grow all of their produce? Does a deli butcher the animals they get their meat from? No. So why should you?

Tags: Business Plan, Hosting, Reseller, Upstream

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Reseller Hosting, Startup Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.