How to Start Your Own Web Hosting Business?

Before we even say a word about starting your own web hosting business, let us tell you that if you think it’s easy money, you might as well stop reading here. Even if you’re considering to go the reseller hosting route (which is the easiest and safest option), it’s still going to take a lot of hard work and efforts, and a decent amount of money to have any chance of setting up a successful web hosting business.

With that out of the way, we will now be getting to the things you’re here for. Now, first things first, this article will be about setting up a web hosting business using the reseller hosting options many reputed hosting providers offer, as it’s the easiest and most convenient way to get into the web hosting game.

Of course, you also have the option of starting your own at-home server hosting business, but given the staggering amount of investment and knowledge it demands, it may not be for most people reading this.

With that said, let’s get down to business.

Getting a Reseller Hosting Package

When you’re going the reseller way with your web hosting business, the first step would obviously be to get a reseller hosting package. Now, while some companies offer these for surprisingly cheap prices, most of them are worth avoiding like the plague.

They have terrible support and the load speeds are sluggish at best; you will likely end up annoying your customers in just a few days if you try to cut corners by going with a cheap provider.

That said, BigRock, GoDaddy, Hostgator are all reputed providers. They offer many different options to suit your needs, and their support is usually good enough to help you out when you get stuck with something.

If you plan to have more than a few customers, you can consider going for a VPS. You would have more control over things and the overall customer experience will be much better than when you get a reseller shared hosting package.

To save on the initial costs, you can find coupons that are easily available online. For instance, if you want to get BigRock VPS, you can simply search for BigRock VPS coupon and it will help you save anywhere between 20 to 50 percent on the total cost. The same goes for other said providers as well.

Branding Your Account

The next step would be branding your reseller account so that you can customize it the way you want to attract potential customers. You would likely have a “branding” panel in your reseller account from where you could make all kinds of changes and basically use it to manage your account.

Getting Customers

Next up is marketing. This is arguably the most important aspect of your business and can very well make or break it when it comes to the success of your business.

If you’re low on budget, you may want to hit up some relevant forums, social media groups and other places to promote your hosting services. It’s going to be free for the most part but can still bring you a decent amount of targeted traffic to get the ball rolling.

Then there’s also SEO, but you need to have a good amount of capital by your side to successfully market your services using this marketing channel. A good approach to it would be to target small local keywords where the competition would be on the lower side but it would still bring in a lot of potential customers. Check out the way that Honest Product Reviews does it’s SEO for ideas on how to create content. As you can see, they create long form (5,000 word articles) with tons of information and graphics. Google tends to love that style and you can create the same type of content to attract web hosting customers.

Finally, there’s PPC, or paid per click advertising. Google Adwords is the most popular form of marketing when it comes to this channel.

While PPC requires considerably lower investment than SEO, you need to be careful as it can burn out your capital in no time. Try to target keywords where you don’t have many other advertisers bidding so that you can get a lower cost per click and be able to get more potential customers while spending less.

Dedicated Support

The support is another crucial aspect of a web hosting business. If all the other features about your service are impressive, such as loading speed, prices, uptime, etc., but the support is terrible, you will likely not be able to sustain whatever success comes your way.

So be prepared to hire some staff or at least a few freelancers online to take care of customer queries as you start getting more customers.