How to Start Your Own Reseller Hosting Business With cPanel
Homebased Web designers or website owners with relevant experience in handling CPanel can easily earn additional income by becoming a reseller of CPanel Web hosting for a Web hosting provider. What exactly is a CPanel reseller account?
Generally, a reseller is someone who acts as a middle man for a Web hosting provider, and with a reseller hosting program, one can easily find affordable packages and invest a little amount of money in it to jumpstart their business right ahead.
A convenient reseller hosting program is a CPanel reseller account. This is because of the control you have in maintaining the disk usage and the bandwidth of your customers with the help of CPanel’s administrative control panel, also called WHM (Web Host Manager).
In this reseller program, you slice the CPanel oriented server into packages that are pre-defined and trade them like you are an independent hosting provider using WHM. Here are steps to start your own CPanel reseller shared hosting account:
• Be a value added reseller. This is probably the most important simply because it is the first step that you need to be doing. Make sure that you get into an agreement with the primary hosting provider with reasonable terms and conditions that would be beneficial to both parties. In this way, the provider would be willing to do more business with you when there’s a need. Bargain for a higher discount. Most providers would give you between 20 to 25 percent and resell a package to customers at full price. However, if this is not possible, then you can get into an agreement with your customer about marketing the service probably to a niche that you have access to but your provider is having difficulties getting business from.
• Create or select a system for your billing. While there are many billing systems available in the market to manage your customer’s billing, you can use the default billing system or module that comes with the CPanel WHM. Purchasing different software or modules just to collect money from your customers would require installation and sometimes a study of how that particular billing system works.
• Open a bank account. What you specifically need is a merchant account. You need this type of bank account to make sure that you can receive both debit and credit card payments from customers. It is recommended that you open an account from a well-known bank, specifically those who have visibility in the global market just in case you would have customers outside of the country. The bank information should then be entered into the billing system to make sure that this is somehow interconnected with your bank. In this way, you are informed if a payment has been made or if the customer is past his due date.
• Create customer packages. Since you are just starting the business, you can create smaller packages to meet the needs of what could probably be your market- the beginners or start up companies or self-employed individuals. Using the WHM, start off by creating just one or two standard packages to accommodate the still growing demand for your business. If there would be specific requests from customers, then that’ll be the time that you make the necessary adjustments or changes.
• Create a fix pricing for domain concerns. Pricing is one of the factors that customers would primarily look into. Make sure that you make it reasonable for them and reasonable for you as well. For domain name concerns, you should choose TLDs (Top Level Domains) to offer your customers (to help them build up their presence as well) and that would of course entail the registration, renewal or transfer processing too.
• Include a trouble ticketing system. This may not be available on your CPanel reseller account, though some billing software offer this feature. So, if you chose to use different billing software and trouble ticketing is available with it, set that up to make sure that you can easily manage and work in real time on issues that your customer may encounter.
• Set up an order wizard online. Make sure that the order wizard, when users try to place an order from your website, can easily access it with just a click of a button. At the same time, it should be well incorporated with the billing system and WHM so as to automatically bill the customer if an order is placed or set the customer’s account to be billed on a future date. You may want to test all of these things from your website before you launch it for order placement.
• Have a backup plan if the order wizard is not yet in full function mode. Not having an order form working correctly on your website doesn’t mean you can’t start your small business. While doing the necessary adjustments on the order wizard, you can set up other means for potential customers to communicate with you. This can be over the phone, by email or by chat. Make the contact information visible to the visitors of the website. Also, this may require you to always have the telephone by your side and be ready to receive calls, regularly check your email and be online most of the time at least during business hours. You may receive communication from customers after business hours, but if your target market would be small businesses as well, they would expect you to operate during their hours too. So, don’t worry about missing a call late at night.
• Be ready to provide support. Providing your contact details for potential customers to inquire and place orders does not stop there. Although you are just a reseller of the services, since you act as a front-liner for the provider, your customers would sometimes call you for some technical assistance. Be ready to have this as a value added feature to your service, if you want more business to come.
These are just a few things that you may want to take note of if you want to earn extra income with the CPanel reseller hosting program.