I don't know much about this, but I keep seeing ads and articles on this. Is it worth my setting up my own reseller site to host all my domains from and maybe make some money on the side if other people do sign up? On one site it says resellers are allowed to buy domains at wholesale prices and are also given discounts on other things. Any advice or opinions?
I used resell hosting almost 5 years back. It was definitely profitable back in those days. Reseller hosting is a good option since you want to host all your domains in one place. Reseller hosting plans provide much more features and space compared to shared hosting. There are some things to consider if you want to resell hosting to other people. You will have to provide full time support and you need a billing software like WHMCS. To get considerable number of new clients you will have advertise or post in webhosting related forums. I am not sure if you can make a lot of money reselling hosting now, since the competition is lot fierce compared to what it was 5 years ago.
There are a few sites you can sign up for free and that can't do any harm, even if I get to buy domains at wholesale prices. I guess with hosting it's trial and error, because after reading numerous reviews some people have bad experiences and others good ones. It may depend on the location of the server and also what kind of sites they are. Mine are very simple and basic ones so shouldn't be too much trouble. The idea of reselling is not one I had thought of and I don't have time to actively market it, but could run some banners and write reviews if the service is good.
I tried reseller hosting several times because I had a large domain name portfolio and was excessively expensive to pay for shared hosting individually or buy a VPS or dedicated server. With reseller I resolve the problem partially because for the price of the package I was able to host as many sites as I could, and yet have some other benefits such as resell hosting to other people or domain names and other products from the company I was hosted with. Problem number one was that while I was able to switch accounts from my reseller control panel to check for each and every of my sites, it was truly annoying setup individual FTP accounts in my client for easy upload, as generally it's not possible to access all the accounts from a root location. Secondly, I had no time to run a hosting company and couldn't benefit from. Finally, I got a domain reseller account, indeed, but to buy domains for my clients, I had to invest money on it, kind of warrant fund that has to be added before being able to sell domains, and similarly for other products to resell. I had no budget for this by then. Actually hosting is cheaper than ever, and both VPSes and dedicated servers too, if a reseller account is considered to host one's own sites, make no sense at all because for cheaper they can host as many times for a lower price and have access with ese to all sites via FTP from a root location. However, it's up to you make a decision based on price comparison and the ultimate purpose you want a reseller account for.
With reseller hosting you might have to resort to desperate measures like giving away hosting or selling it for 1 USD a month. You often have to do these things because a newbie lacks credibility. However, one has to be careful because if you don't manage your free hosting giveaways and other things then the performance for users could suffer. In that case, you could lose customers and of course your reputation goes downhill. Also, as another commentator noted, everyone is selling reseller hosting now, so what would you really have to offer to beat the competition?
