Reseller Hosting
The pandemic has brought about a sea-change for many businesses. They have been forced to embrace working from home and remote access to their infrastructure and systems. Many have set up e-commerce shops.
All of this has been accomplished while under extreme financial pressure, especially for IT which has been asked to modify its infrastructure and organization to meet these new challenges.
However, as often happens, changes bring opportunities. IT needs to keep existing systems running while making the transition to the new environment and is looking to outsource either the existing operations or to set up an outsourced development environment that will, in time, become the new operating environment.
Consequently, there is a growing market for managed service providers (“MSP”) who offer outsourced hosting services. Setting up as an MSP can be a costly business, and even with the necessary capital, it can take some time to get underway.
Reseller Hosting Provider
One option, and one that has been embraced by the larger MSPs, is to offer hosting services to reseller hosting businesses, especially reseller hosting services that can be resold under their own branding.
So, Reseller Hosting is exactly that, an MSP business that offers hosting services under its own name but uses the infrastructure of a larger MSP. A Reseller Hosting Provider is an MSP, like HostSailor, that offers a reseller program.
What is the difference between Shared and Reseller Hosting
At its simplest, Shared Hosting is typically used by a single business to support their online activities and Reseller Hosting is where a business wants to sell hosting services to its clients.
Shared Hosting is where an MSP supports a client infrastructure on a server that it shares with other clients. There are obvious security issues in having applications and data on a shared server, which can be mitigated to a great extent in a Virtual Private Server environment (“VPS”).
Reseller Hosting needs a VPS environment, first to be able to carry the reseller branding, and secondly to ensure that reseller clients are isolated from other reseller clients. From the MSP’s viewpoint, a VPS environment for resellers allows them to manage their own clients, and for the MSP to manage the reseller as a complete entity.
Here are software applications, such as SolusVM, supporting environments that meet these exact requirements. HostSailor uses SolusVM as part of our SuperReseller Program.
Cheap Reseller Hosting
As with any business, what you charge your customers depends on your input costs and a profit margin. Again as for any business an MSP and Reseller has fixed and variable direct and indirect costs.
For the MSP there are the fixed costs of supplying and managing the physical infrastructure supporting your Reseller Hosting operation. This will include maintenance charges for hardware and software and any other regular infrastructure-related costs. Variable costs will include payroll costs, utilities and perhaps local and national taxation.
For the reseller, the infrastructure cost is replaced by the MSP’s hosting charge, with all other costs being of a similar type.
These of course must be offset by the income from clients in order to achieve a profit.
Cheapness is then based on the MSP’s hosting fee, and what the reseller thinks the market can bear.
Conclusion
There is a growing market for reseller services, with all indications that it will continue to grow. For a reseller, the current changes in the overall IT market mean significant opportunities to sell hosting services supported by a large MSP.
The key is providing a cost-effective bouquet of hosting plans with add-on options at attractive prices to potential customers, backed up by the highest quality support services from the reseller and the upstream MSP.
HostSailor is very experienced in managed service provision. Our reseller programs are aimed at supporting resellers in supplying cost-effective and well-supported programs to their clients.
Please contact us if you would like an informal discussion on pricing and our VPS Hosting Plans.