Reseller hosting can be an exciting business venture for individuals. The business does not require much startup cost, and if managed properly, one can gain large profit from it. Generally, a web hosting reseller purchases server spaces and bandwidth from a larger hosting company, and redistributing them to end users. The services are provided transparently to the users by the larger hosting company, so the end users do not generally know they are dealing with resellers. Since the 24x7 support and server maintenance duties can also be deligated to the larger hosting company at a nominal fee, the reseller can focus on sales and marketing aspect of the business.

With recent price drops and increase in space and bandwidth on hosting services, as well as the ability to offer multiple domain hosting on virtual (or shared) hosting services make it ideal for individuals to offer reseller hosting services to end users. Major hosting companies today offer unlimited domain hosting with large amount of shared disk spaces for resellers, making it a profitable business venture once you understand the business model. Also, some hosts allow you to oversell the space and do not charge you extra until actual overage occurs on your account. A typical user generally consumes a fraction of space and bandwidth allocated to him.

The web hosting business model generates residual income. Your customers will stay with you month to month, and year after year as long as you satisfy them and meet their demand. The cost of offering web hosting service to your customers descrease year after year, and hence you can offer them more space and bandwidth. As you grow, you may also earn more business by providing reseller hosting services to a smaller resellers. Providing web hosting services on the reseller account eliminates the difficulties involved with a hosting business. The hardware purchases, server maintenance, technical support and setting up a required infrastructure makes hosting business very expensive and time consuming. With a reseller hosting, you simply take advantage of the hosting resources provided by the larger host and just focus on generating residual business.

This article is written by Scott Seong, a founder and CEO of edula.com. If you have comments or feedback on this article, please send them to feedback@topwebhosting.com.