Selling Web Hosting For Profit

By John Stone
Posted Friday, October 1, 2004

In today's Internet, everyone and their brother are jumping on the hosting band wagon. On the one hand, you have the mega hosts (with a look of security and safety) and the independents (who in most cases look barely credible). Software vendors are getting into the act, as well as most other companies that offer anything from baseball cards to safety glasses.

So what is the deal? How did we get to a point that EVERYONE can offer web hosting? The answer is simple. In most cases, everyone is not offering web hosting.

Reselling web hosting has been made available by one of the greatest examples of Internet marketing practices on the Internet. The power of parallel marketing! It starts with a company that has a strategy of owning hundreds of servers with high-speed connectivity to the Internet.

The primary income conduit is leasing servers to hosting companies. As a parallel service, they offer server co-location. If you own a server, they will throw it in their data center. You get a managed server and a high speed internet connection, the hosting company makes a few extra bucks.

The server owner can now open up his or her server for resellers and affiliates. Sometimes this is the primary business plan and in other cases, it becomes a way to reduce overhead.

Affiliates and resellers now have the opportunity to make a little extra cash by complementing their services with hosting services. I bet your thinking that most people would just want to avoid resellers. Well, that may not be the case. Many people are using a reseller as the primary point of contact and never even know it.

Resellers should have the ability to handle most of the issues. But that is not what most people want from a hosting company. What they are really paying for is relationship. Resellers will have a handful of clients and know them all by name. They will also understand your business needs and work harder.

Reselling hosting as a logical extension to your Internet business can be a profitable thing. In the worst case, you have an opportunity to reduce your web site overhead.

Follow these steps and you can't miss!

To your success,

John Stone
(http://stoco.net)
(http://pubmgr.stoco.net)

About the Author
John Stone is the founder of Stoco.net, a service based Internet site dedicated to delivering solutions for the small business owner. John has released several commercial software products and provides web hosting at discount prices. Software products include small utilities for organizations, automation and web site control including Publication Manager (an Email Autoresponder) and Ad Manager (a web page automation tool). John is also recognized as a Perl automation expert and offers advice to the Internet newbie through Stoco.net and MaxTrafficExchange.com.