How to Start Your Own Web Hosting Business?

Looking to start your own web hosting business? If you are, this guide may be the perfect place to start. In this article, I will talk about what reseller hosting is and how to start your own web hosting business online using reseller hosting, and that too at a bare minimum setup. In addition to all these, I will introduce you to the best reseller hosting services in 2024.

Let's start with some motivation.

The HostGator Case

One of the biggest hosting companies on the web, HostGator, was founded by Brent Oxley in his dorm room at the University. How did he do it? By becoming a reseller of a large data center company called The Planet which later became SoftLayer. Softlayer was a data center that owned and managed the servers, network, and other infrastructure while the reselling companies rented space on their servers and sold hosting to their own customers under their own brand names.

Softlayer was acquired by IBM in 2013 - but HostGator went way ahead.

HostGator is now one of the best hosting services online.

This is how web hosting businesses run, more often than not.

If you are a web developer or a web development agency, you can, too, start with reseller hosting and grow like how Hostgator did.

In addition to profit margins, reseller hosting services also offer you access to an open space of opportunities, leads, and customer base.

What is Reseller Hosting?

In reseller hosting, the hosting provider allocates you a certain bandwidth and hard drive space, which you can employ for hosting sites of your own clients & users.

The reseller company will also facilitate you to create your own plans, prices and other services, all with your brand name on them.

Depending on your technical expertise and how small or big you want to start with, you can have the parent host manage most of the support while you act as a communication medium between the host and your clients.

So for any technical issues that your client faces, you relay them to the host, and it is their job to resolve them.

But this also means you will have to regularly monitor the system to see if everything’s going smooth on both ends-your customer and the parent host.

Finding a Good Reseller Hosting Provider

Most of the large hosting companies offer reseller hosting these days. Here are some tips for choosing one among them:

Compare their rates

Of course, you don’t want to blindly choose the least expensive one, but it helps to know the rates and understand how much you can charge for your own hosting service later.

Technical Support

Probably the most important criteria. Check how much technical support your host will provide to your clients. Not all of them offer complete support, so you will need to decide how much customer assistance you can provide yourself. Personally, I’d prefer a company with round-the-clock support via chat and phone.

Uptime

Another crucial factor in deciding on a hosting company is its uptime record. If you don’t want to face angry customers later, choose a company that has less than 1% downtime, which ensures all the sites hosted on their servers rarely go down.

Best Reseller Hosting Providers

Let’s now take a quick look at my picks for the best reseller hosting providers and see which one fits your needs. For your convenience, I have listed the top picks for all-important needs here:

Let's see these in detail:

ResellerClub

ResellerClub is the best reseller hosting overall.

ResellerClub offers scalable, feature-rich reseller hosting plans with a user-friendly interface. It includes unlimited cPanel accounts, free SSL certificates, and white-label branding. As a reseller, you experience top-notch performance with its global CDN and SSD storage. The 24/7 customer support ensures smooth operations, while the free migration service simplifies the transition from other hosting providers.

Useful for all needs. It is recommended even by Bluehost. Trusted by 200000 resellers worldwide.

Hostgator

HostGator provides powerful reseller hosting with an easy-to-manage WHM control panel, allowing you to create and manage cPanel accounts. Features include unlimited domains, subdomains, email accounts, and MySQL databases. With free SSL, automated daily backups, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee, HostGator ensures reliability. Benefit from their 24/7/365 support, and free reseller club membership for additional tools.

Hostgator is the best for a limited number of sites. Useful for high-end clients and users.

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks offers eco-friendly reseller hosting solutions with 100% renewable energy. Plans include unlimited SSD storage, cPanel accounts, and bandwidth. Features like the free CDN, LiteSpeed web server, and nightly backups ensure optimal performance and security. GreenGeeks also provides white-label branding, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and 24/7 expert support to enhance your reselling experience.

GreenGeeks is the best environment-friendly hosting. Useful if you have clients from green-energy or top-level businesses with green-energy needs.

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting boasts lightning-fast reseller hosting with their Turbo Servers, offering 20x faster performance. Experience flexibility with scalable plans, unlimited SSD storage, and bandwidth. The WHM control panel, free SSL, and automatic backups ensure a secure and reliable hosting environment. A2 Hosting also provides free migration, 24/7 Guru Crew support, and a money-back guarantee.

A2 Hosting has to be the best reseller hosting for support and pricing.

HostPapa

HostPapa's reseller hosting plans offer robust features for businesses of all sizes. Enjoy unlimited cPanel accounts, SSD storage, and free SSL certificates. With white-label branding and customizable plans, you can build your own hosting packages. The 24/7 support, proactive server monitoring, and free migration service ensure a seamless experience, backed by a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Hostpapa is for those who don't know their way around. Ideal for fresh and upcoming hosting startups.

Hostinger Agency Hosting

Hostinger Agency Hosting delivers affordable reseller plans with unlimited websites, email accounts, and MySQL databases. The user-friendly hPanel lets you manage your clients with ease, while the free SSL and daily backups guarantee security. Benefit from white-label hosting, custom nameservers, and priority 24/7 customer support. Hostinger's powerful infrastructure ensures fast and reliable performance for your reseller business.

Hostinger Agency Hosting is ideal if you are an agency offering hosting to your dedicated clients and not general users.

Promoting your Hosting Service

Now, once you are done with all the setup and things, you need more users for your new hosting service. For this, you can try various digital marketing and local SEO techniques. Advertise your company in online classifieds, and marketing blogs and promote your site via organic SEO and paid traffic using Google Ads or Facebook Ads. But don’t limit your advertising only to the Internet.

You can go to your local businesses and distribute flyers that showcase your services and how they can benefit from hosting their sites with you. Additionally, you could set up promotional banners, newspaper ads and signages in your coverage areas.

If you have some more budget, you can also sponsor tech events, giveaways and networking seminars in your local business community to get more exposure. Sponsoring blogs, and newsletters and buying paid tweets can also help.

Additionally, you can pitch your web hosting business to other websites using digital banner ads and guest posts. Here are some guest posting sites that you can try.

If you’re already offering some kind of web services to your clients like web design or programming, tell them about your new hosting service. They are the ones most likely to sign up with you.

Since you would be just starting, you may even launch a discount offer and bulk rates for those who sign up early. Give them the best possible customer service, create attractive hosting plans (of course, don’t promise any features that your own host doesn’t offer!) and encourage them to spread the word about your hosting, thus making your own clients into affiliates.

Once you have a few customers, you can expand your business by hiring employees to take care of the support, maintenance, and minor technical issues.

So there you have it. A web hosting business is a profitable online business you can start from home and earn a passive income month on month. All you need is a decent computer and lots of determination and the ability to work hard.