Freelancing is unpredictable. You might have three website projects one month and then spend the next wondering where everyone has gone. If that sounds like your stressful reality, recurring services could give you some freedom.
If you’re already designing, developing, or managing websites for clients in India, they’ll need hosting after you’ve finished building the site anyway. Reseller hosting lets you provide that hosting yourself and charge clients monthly or annually. You don’t need to own servers or suddenly become a hosting company with a massive technical team either, and the outlay to get started is small enough that a couple of clients can cover it.
Read on to find out more.
How to become a web hosting reseller?
Reseller hosting essentially involves buying hosting resources from a provider and splitting them between your clients. You simply need to:
- Choose a reseller hosting plan.
- Create individual hosting accounts.
- Decide how much you want to charge for them.
Reseller hosting from Verpex, for example, gives freelancers access to WHM (WebHost Manager) for managing accounts. Its entry-level plans, Reseller 15 and Reseller 30, come with 15 and 30 cPanel accounts respectively, which is usually more room than a freelance client list needs and keeps your starting cost low.
You can usually also white-label the service with your own branding and nameservers, so clients see your business rather than the original hosting reseller.
From there, you can:
- Create different hosting packages.
- Decide how much storage and other resources clients receive.
- Set your own prices.
- Create individual cPanel accounts.
- Add your own branding.
- Bill clients monthly or annually.
You don’t necessarily need loads of clients to start, and you’re not paying for capacity you haven’t sold yet.
Earning money as a web hosting reseller.
The obvious benefit is recurring income. Building a website might give you one fairly large payment, but hosting can continue generating income for as long as the client keeps their website with you.
If you had 10 clients paying ₹800 per month for hosting, for example, that’s ₹8,000 coming in every month before your hosting plan, billing software, taxes, and any other business costs.
What makes the numbers work is that your plan is a single fixed cost. Ten sites on a Reseller 15 plan means each one costs you a tenth of that plan; fill the remaining accounts and the cost per site falls again. Your outgoing stays flat while your income doesn’t, which is why the entry plans tend to pay for themselves early.
Verpex has a profit calculator on its reseller page, under “How much can you make?”, which saves you doing that arithmetic by hand. You choose a plan, set how many clients you expect and what you’d charge each of them, and it returns the monthly and annual figures. Running a few combinations through it before you fix your rate is a sensible way to see what you’d actually clear at different price points.
You can also bundle hosting with services you’re probably already offering, such as:
- Website maintenance.
- WordPress updates.
- Backups.
- Domain management.
- Email.
- Security monitoring.
That can make more sense than trying to sell hosting as a completely separate business. A freelance developer might finish a new website and offer the client an ongoing package that covers hosting and maintenance.
The client doesn’t then have to work out hosting themselves, and you’ve turned a one-off project into something that can keep bringing in revenue.
What people need from hosting services?
Most clients probably won’t care which server software you’re using or spend their evening comparing hosting specifications.
They want their website to work. That usually means:
- Fast loading times.
- Reliable uptime.
- SSL.
- Regular backups.
- Enough storage and bandwidth.
- Working email accounts.
- Help when something goes wrong.
Price matters as well. Clients here will happily compare your quote against the shared hosting plans they could buy themselves, so what you charge has to look like fair value rather than a fee for convenience. The gap between what each account costs you and what you bill for it is what gives you room to stay competitive and still earn from it.
Customer support is so important when you’re reselling hosting because you’re normally the person your client contacts first. You should always display your email and, ideally, a phone number for rapid issue resolution.
With reseller hosting, you’re not trying to convince random people to buy hosting from you. You’re offering another service to clients who already need it and potentially creating recurring income from work you’re already doing. For the price of one plan, it’s a fairly small bet to place on work that’s already in front of you.
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