What is Reseller hosting?
Reseller hosting is a process where a large amount of server disk space and bandwidth is purchased from reseller providers such as Brixly, which is then sold to others for a profit.
Reseller Hosting introduces a fantastic opportunity to introduce or increase recurring revenue and to build lasting relationships with your clients.
In short, reseller hosting allows you to sell web hosting plans and products to your own clients. By using a reliable reseller hosting provider you are able to sell web hosting without the complex, expensive and somewhat daunting need to run your own infrastructure.
This makes reseller hosting an ideal solution for web and creative agencies or start-up web hosts.
How to Become a Reseller Host
First things first – you need to choose the right web hosting provider. Think of your new web hosting provider as your future ‘partner’, rather than a supplier and spend time considering their packages, pricing and additional benefits. Whilst cost is always an important factor to take into consideration, do also note that more importantly you and your business will be heavily dependent on your reseller hosting provider moving forward – uptime, reliability and platform are significantly more important points to consider for the long term.
For instance, Brixly offers multiple reseller hosting plans…
Reseller Entry (available on cPanel and DirectAdmin)
Reseller Pro (available on cPanel and DirectAdmin)
Reseller Premium (available on cPanel only)
In addition, you may want to also consider selling additional items, such as VPS servers, domain names and more and being able to do so with the same provider can make a real difference.
Becoming a reseller is simple. Doing the right thing for you and your clients is a key part of making that decision – if you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out to us via live chat to discuss potential options to suit you and your business.
What to Look for in Your Reseller Hosting Provider
Finding the right hosting provider for your business is absolutely essential. Your clients will be heavily dependent on your hosting provider, so there are a huge number of factors to take into consideration when making your choice.
Customer Support:
Reseller hosting can be complex, and the need for a knowledgeable and responsive support team will be almost as important as the underlying infrastructure.
This is another area where quality really does make a difference. It’s important that the staff actually supporting you and your business have the knowledge to do so. Don’t just look for a provider with ‘instant responses’, as this generally relates to a mass of ‘front-line’ or inexperienced support agents who can help answer basic questions, but can’t really help with anything ‘significant’.
Instead, spend some time doing some research online (for example, Trustpilot for reviews) and look specifically at content relating to the support team. Don’t let the odd negative review deter you entirely, but instead look at the context to gain some background.
What is important when considering a hosting provider is to ensure that support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – technology can sometimes go wrong, and you need to ensure you are able to reach out when and if things do go wrong.
This is a strange one, but look for a hosting provider with some ‘structure’ to the way in which they provide support – this is a very solid sign of efficiency, which plays a huge role with support. If they are asking you the correct questions before opening a ticket, then you are on for a winner! This ensures that the information is presented to the agent (and in some cases, provides quite extensive diagnostic information) before they even respond. The goal with a support issue is to have the details presented to get a quick, and concise response to resolve the problem ‘conclusively’, rather than to go back and forth (this is why we feel live chat is incredibly ineffective!).
Uptime and Reliability:
Uptime is calculated as the percentage of time when the server is online. Given reseller hosting is a shared service, no provider would offer 100% uptime as a guarantee, however, most (including ourselves) offer a percentage very close. This allows small windows of outages which are generally unnoticeable.
For example, an uptime SLA of 99.9% means that the web server which hosts your websites would typically remain online for this percentage or higher.
Another important factor to consider with the uptime SLA is to consider what specifically is being monitored by the hosts, as unfortunately, some are less transparent than others! Some simply monitor a ‘ping response’ from a server, which isn’t in our opinion an accurate representation of uptime.
Instead, we monitor a WordPress installation hosted on each server directly, which means that we monitor within the SLA calculations additional aspects, such as MySQL and PHP-related problems.
When looking for a reseller hosting provider, we would strongly encourage finding one which has transparent and visible statistics of their services (usually a status page).
The importance of uptime for you and your clients is to demonstrate that your site is reliable and trustworthy, but it also ensures that your product or service stays operational. Uptime monitoring helps you identify when your site is experiencing issues and provides a real-time view of how your site is performing.
You are able to set up your own monitoring for your websites (usually monitoring just one site, or a small handful is necessary to avoid being bombarded with notifications even during the smallest of outages).
There are a number of tools to achieve this, such as UptimeRobot, Pingdom or Status.net which will alert you when your site goes offline and provides detailed information about what caused the outage. Most hosting providers will offer a ‘status page’, which should display whether a server is offline or is undergoing maintenance – for example at Brixly you can check our status page by visiting https://status.brixly.uk
Security:
Keeping your client’s websites secure, and free from disaster is business critical. It’s important to know and understand that the tools used and implemented by your hosting provider are robust enough to protect you and your clients.
There are many security tools available, such as CSF which are capable of preventing a number of attacks. However, there are commercially available tools available which significantly strengthen the hosting platform of your provider’s web hosting infrastructure.
Whilst these tools can be a big investment for your hosting provider, they can make a real difference when it comes to new and upcoming exploits which can have disastrous consequences.
We have chosen to protect all of our servers with the industry-leading ‘Imunify360‘, which boats an overwhelming amount of protection from zero-day exploits, malware and attacks.
SSL Certificates offer a layer of encryption to your website. Let’s be honest here – the days have passed when an SSL certificate was optional. However, as has the need to actually pay for SSL protection.
There are of course certain scenarios where ‘paid’ certificates may be required (for example, large e-commerce websites) but generally speaking, domain-verified SSL certificates should be free of charge.
We are pleased to offer two solutions for SSL certificates, both of which are completely free. The first is a process called ‘AutoSSL’, which installs an SSL certificate to your website automatically . Additionally, you are able to install LetsEncrypt certificates from within cPanel in just a few clicks with an almost instant installation which again, is completely free of charge.
Check out our comparison on Imunify360 vs BitNinja
Migrations:
Migration to a provider should be simple and should be possible with minimal interruption or downtime. Over time, you will no doubt acquire more and more clients in your hosting platform, and scaling your business should be effortless.
To alleviate this, our in-house development team built a product exclusive to Brixly called the ‘Migration Center’ – this tool allows you to migrate cPanel hosting accounts from any other provider to our own hosting infrastructure in just minutes (rather than the typical days, or sometimes weeks!).
This works not only for individual cPanel accounts, but can be used to migrate entire reseller accounts from another cPanel hosting provider in just a few clicks.
But one very important consideration which is very often missed is the ability to move away from a provider, and much of that boils down to the control panel that is available with your provider.
Every day we see clients and resellers looking to migrate to a new hosting provider, but are struggling to do so due to the fact their old hosting provider has built a ‘bespoke’ control panel. This is quite commonly seen with providers such as 20i or Heart Internet.
Here at Brixly, we have an ethos that if a client is unhappy, they should have the freedom to leave. This is why we use industry-leading control panels which offer that additional level of flexibility.
There are ways to migrate your accounts still, and although the process is more time-consuming, the good news is it’s still possible.
Are you feeling a little stuck with your existing hosting provider? Feel free to reach out to our team who would be more than happy to discuss potential options.
Performance and Infrastructure:
Our shared and reseller hosting plans come with the outstanding ‘Litespeed Enterprise’ web server, a high-performance Apache alternative. Combined with LSCache for WordPress and many other applications, Litespeed offers unparalleled performance for your websites.
In addition, our UK-based infrastructure has been built in-house to offer outstanding performance consistently, whilst adding a number of additional benefits such as redundancy.
The underlying infrastructure is so important, which brings us back to our earlier statement regarding cost – the cheapest typically doesn’t mean best, and if it’s too good to be true – it most likely is. The truth is, the underlying infrastructure of your hosting platform is so, so much more than just a ‘server’.
We won’t go too extensively into the details here, but we do have a great page on our website which boasts the incredible infrastructure we have built in-house to offer what we consider to be unbeatable performance…
Upsell Opportunities and Products:
Since our inception, our focus has been to provide an incomparable platform specifically tailored for the reseller market – we love resellers, it’s our bread and butter!
In doing so, we have built an incredible platform to allow you to expand your reseller business beyond the capabilities of just web hosting.
Traditionally, selling VPS servers, Reseller Hosting accounts or Dedicated Servers wasn’t possible without a significant amount of hardware, resource and expertise to back it. Now, this has changed with the introduction of our ‘Reseller Elite’ module, which is included with each and every reseller account here at Brixly.
The module is a WHMCS module that allows you to sell the following products…
- VPS / Cloud Servers
- Dedicated Servers (coming soon)
- Premium Hosting
- Reseller Hosting
We also have our own domain reseller module, which allows you to sell over 800 domain extensions to your clients seamlessly through WHMCS.
Benefits of becoming a web reseller
Start-up costs
When starting a Reseller business, it is crucial that you have all the resources needed in place. To run a Reseller business, you need a reseller plan, a domain name & email accounts, your brand logo and information about your company. Those are the most essential things required to start your reseller business.
As a web hosting reseller, you can have affordable web hosting for your website while at the same time, bring in extra income by providing hosting services to others. With very little investment you can start by purchasing disk space and bandwidth in small allotments and eventually work your way up to a dedicated server.
For example, at Brixly, we are so confident that you will love our service that we offer you the first month for just £1 on all our reseller plans!
Most of our UK domains start at £6.99, including TDLs such as, .co.uk, .uk, .org.uk. The most popular TLD .com starts at £10.29. The start-up costs, in this case, depend on what TLD you choose to go for. If you decide to go with a UK TLD, it would not cost you more than £10 for the hosting and domain.
White-Label Branding
White-label reseller hosting essentially provides you with the ability to mask certain areas of the hosting platform as your own, by allowing you to add your own logos and branding.
Resellers are responsible for their own branding as they are essentially their own hosting business. Everything from your website, logos, emails and services will be unbranded, giving you the freedom to tailor your brand just the way you like it.
Fully managed service
Managing a business, especially a web hosting business can be stressful and requires a huge amount of experience. Trust us when we say, it really isn’t as simple as just ‘setting up a server’! However, as a reseller, you only have to worry about your brand, customers and billing.
It is the job of the reseller web hosting company you buy disk storage and bandwidth from to maintain and monitor server equipment. You do not need to have a lot of technical knowledge and anyone familiar with the Internet can start a successful reseller hosting business. All technical aspects are the responsibility of the reseller web hosting provider– Server updates, hardware maintenance, and configurations and other administrative tasks.
At Brixly we have experts at hand to help with security, server maintenance and pretty much any technical support needed. Just send us a ticket or email us.
Profits
As a reseller, you want to make sure your business is profitable, and starting out with reseller hosting is an ideal opportunity to do so. You are able to do so without worrying about licencing, software or infrastructure.
To give you some examples of the potential profit margins of a reseller hosting platform, lets consider a few examples…
Reseller Pro 50 – £24.95
With this plan, you are able to host 50 cPanel accounts, with no additional cost per user. This calculates to just £0.50 per user, leaving you a generous profit margin.
Charging just £3.99 per account, you would be looking at revenue of £199.50 per month, leaving you a profit margin of £174.55.
However, the truth here is, the price you can charge depends on your industry, your target market and your demographic. This is probably going to come across as blunt, but don’t cheapen yourself by competing on price alone – the method I can assure you from first-hand experience, does not work. The industry is competitive and is completely saturated with cheap hosting providers that frankly, are awful!
Focusing on user experience, support and other areas of your business will allow that pricing margin to increase significantly, whilst leaving us to take care of the underlying platform.
We have seen some of our resellers charge upwards of £30 – £100 per individual account, which is achievable due to the other benefits their business has introduced as part of the plan (for example, WordPress management agencies, web designs etc).
At £30 per account, this leaves you an incredibly generous revenue of £1500 per month. Better yet, this is one of our smaller plans, and scaling is possible to near infinite scale.
Opportunities to expand
When it comes to acquiring new customers and expanding your business, reselling really doesn’t have an upper limit. Although our reseller hosting plans are limited to 250 accounts, you can always purchase additional reseller hosting plans if you do manage to exceed your account limits on a particular server.
You can even use this opportunity to expand your web hosting business or services across multiple locations! We have a large number of clients who successfully sell web hosting in the UK, Germany, Singapore and the USA all from a single Brixly account!
Expansion opportunities shouldn’t stop there, however, and it’s an important consideration when choosing your reseller hosting provider. You should also consider upgrade options such as larger hosting plans (such as Domain Names, our Premium Hosting, VPS Servers or Dedicated Servers) that allow you to scale your business beyond just ‘web hosting’.
Flexibility
One of the best things about running a reseller hosting business is that you are your boss, and you can set your own working hours. You can work from anywhere, provided you have a laptop/computer with internet access and your reseller package is active.
Many of our clients (who now run successful hosting businesses, design agencies or creative media agencies) started working alongside their full-time position to avoid as much risk as possible.
Reseller web hosting with us allows you to focus on your business growth, rather than infrastructure (leave that to us).
The Brixly Brand
Here at Brixly, our entire business was built around the reseller hosting market to offer what we consider to be an unbeatable platform for resellers. We love what we do, and our service, business and product have been awarded numerous times both in the UK, and globally.
Our reseller hosting platform will allow you to start selling fast, reliable and secure web hosting plans with our industry-leading infrastructure and unparalleled support.
Why Choose Us?
When all is said and done, we are a multi-award-winning hosting provider that specialises in the reseller market. Our team is made up of tech enthusiasts and system developers with a passion for what they do.
Our credentials speak for themselves, we host over 250,000 sites, blogs, and business sites, making us one of the fastest-growing hosting companies in the UK. We are so confident you will love our service, you can ask for a refund within 30 days if you aren’t satisfied.
cPanel Reseller Hosting
With our fully redundant NVMe cloud infrastructure, we provide consistent, leading-edge cPanel reseller hosting. cPanel is the industry-standard user interface for managing and simplifying web hosting services. The application is very user-friendly, made even easier with our custom system. Our cPanel system is so intuitive and easy to use, you don’t need any previous web hosting or administration experience to begin using it. You can practically get started running your own reseller hosting company today.
DirectAdmin Reseller Hosting
In addition to cPanel, we offer DirectAdmin as well, which is a more affordable yet just as powerful web hosting solution. Like cPanel, DirectAdmin is an easy-to-use interface for reseller hosting. However, the interface is a little more bare-bones. It is, therefore, recommended more for those with experience and a limited budget. But don’t be put off by this, as it still has the same features as the easier-to-use cPanel system. In addition, our unlimited reseller hosting offers DirectAdmin at an affordable set cost, making it a better starting choice over cPanel.
There is an easy interface for setting up your system in both cases, but, DirectAdmin is more developer-friendly rather than user-friendly. In contrast, cPanel provides almost all the features and options through the graphical user interface.
The Amazing Features We Offer
Everything at Brixly is packaged and ready to go, so you can get selling to your customers as soon as possible. All our services are above and beyond, and any from our reseller hosting package could be the basis of your very own business:
- Simple and intuitive cPanel and DirectAdmin interfaces
- Industry-standard configuration and white-labelling
- LiteSpeed Enterprise for cutting-edge performance
- Customer domains and emails for your websites and blogs
- Free, Full 256bit SSL certificates for better security
- The fastest possible NVMe cloud storage
- Email SPAM protection for increased security
- You can sell individual features such as emails, domains and hosting separately
We give you a fully automated selling experience so you can grow your business. We know that hosting isn’t just about sales, as a result, our system offers you exclusive tools and broadens your product line.
Conclusion
Becoming a reseller host is easy with the right provider. Brixly offers cutting-edge tools and systems redesigned for easy white-label customization. With our cPanel and DirectAdmin packages, you can integrate into CMS for packaging custom web services for your customers.
