Reseller, Selling webhosting to people - questions

Hello,

I was looking at the reselling page at hostgator. I never have been a reseller. I was thinking of starting up a business in webhosting. I wanted to know how hard or how long does it take to get setup? I'm a computer tech so I know some technical things.

Does hostgator provide customer support?
Do I need to purchase a merchant account?
Can the reseller plan that I pay for be used to run my reselling site and other sites I make?
What is the limit for bandwidth and diskspace that I can sell to my customers?
Are there any limits on the pricing I choose?
If there is a problem with hostgator servers will they email me asap about it?

I have many questions because I'm new to this, sorry. Please answer what you can. If anyone is currently reselling can you explain a bit how you started and how it is going.

Thanks

[David]

Originally Posted by Vic

Hello,

I was looking at the reselling page at hostgator. I never have been a reseller. I was thinking of starting up a business in webhosting. I wanted to know how hard or how long does it take to get setup? I'm a computer tech so I know some technical things.

Does hostgator provide customer support?
Do I need to purchase a merchant account?
Can the reseller plan that I pay for be used to run my reselling site and other sites I make?
What is the limit for bandwidth and diskspace that I can sell to my customers?
Are there any limits on the pricing I choose?
If there is a problem with hostgator servers will they email me asap about it?

I have many questions because I'm new to this, sorry. Please answer what you can. If anyone is currently reselling can you explain a bit how you started and how it is going.

Thanks

Vic,

I'll try to answer your questions. If I am mistaken on anything I'm sure someone will correct me

Does hostgator provide customer support? Yes to you, not your customers, you have to do that.

Do I need to purchase a merchant account? You would need something like Paypal or another account to process payments online.

Can the reseller plan that I pay for be used to run my reselling site and other sites I make? Yes. I think most of the resellers here do it that way.

What is the limit for bandwidth and diskspace that I can sell to my customers? You can sell as much as you want up to your reseller plan b/w limit.

Are there any limits on the pricing I choose? Set whatever prices you want to charge your clients.

If there is a problem with hostgator servers will they email me asap about it? Well, I'm not really sure on this. They tend to only post in the forums here about scheduled downtime and outages. I subscribe to the two forums for annoucements and network status, but don't expect to get emails if your server is down, at least I never have.

David

[dancerdog3]

In a nutshell, you are buying a service and then you are selling a service. There are meny examples of this... Dell, Loaf-n-Jug, 7-11, Amazon.com, etc. What you need to do is create a reason for a customer to come to you instead of the company ou buy from. Do you offer more services? Are you more customer friendly? Do you build websites too? Are you prices and packages more tuned to a specific audience?

Web Hosting is like any other service. You don't need to drill an oil well to sell gasoline. HG is a good hosting company. They don't email you about problems, but they do seem to respond quickly to any issues.

You can charge any price for services you offer. Some hosting resellers have free accounts. Others charge an arm and a leg, but have it tied into other services they offer.

That is my 2 cents on web hosting. Good luck in your hosting future!