a plane for a resller business ?

[NewBeginner]

Happy New Year 2006 for all

plz only successful reseller business owners reply :)

what is the business scenarios for a successful reseller business ?
starting from A to Z

Merry Christmass

[Mini]

What do you mean?

Mini

[Jan]

A - ave my doubts anyone has a plan these days.
B - Be open and honest.
C - Creativity
D - Don't tork l1k3 a h4x0r
E - Education
F - Forget it, most prolly don't know the alphabet anyway :p

[nex-gen host]

A reseller plane? Lol, I saw this and thought someone was running a reseller webhost in the sky - you can host warez as theres no copyright:D
Lol:D
My advice?

Get a good site design, nothing puts of a customer like a bad site design, if your not good at site design get a proffesional, you can get a full kit out from $200 (thats about what I charge) it really makes a difference, its the best investment you'll ever make. Make sure its easy to navigate, new customers may be put off if they can't find info, make it very informative without being cramped. Want a BAD example? www.godaddy.com - great hosting but who ever made the nav for the site screwed up bad, its hard to tell how much plans cost and what features they offer, they say for example "up to 5000gb bandwidth starting from only $3" what they mean is that the plans start from $3 and that they offer up to 5000gb band, not that $3 gets you 5000gb things like this that confuse customers are likely to irritate them and make them go elsewhere.

Offer good things that will attract customers like unlimited extras - it costs you nothing extra and really helps get customers, its against my ethos to charge people for something that costs me nothing.

Dont oversell ridiculously, if u offer 100gb space and only have 30gb available and the person uses the full 100gb (or tries too) your in trouble, youve just broken the law. Thats where many free hosts fail.

Offer good support, customers like good support, it reassures them. Infact, good support is probably the most important thing that you need to offer, it seriously puts people off if they ask for help and only get it 4 days later.

Offer a variaty of packages, 4 or 3 vaired packages from small to big, this gives customers options, they are more likely to buy.

Dont be afraid to invest, google adwords for example may hurt a bit but the return you get is very good, think about advertsing and promotion.

Be prepared to work your butt off, I run a free host and have not had 6 hours sleep since it launched, bear this in mind before you jump in. It takes so much work, its not just running the site, promotional and support are things people forget about, I spend at least 2 hours a night promoting our host on other peoples forums.

Support, you have to have it covered 24/7 if not you risk losing custom and bad reviews, make sure your customers have the best support you can give, offer many options, we offer email and 3 different instant messengers, we belive this is prefferable to phone support.

Keep with the times. You cant sit still, you need to keep up with what other people are doing, but don't forget that when you get new customers you still need to look after the old ones. Keep your packages up to date. For example many hosts are losing out because new hosts like us offer unlimited extras like MySqls and FTP accounts, this is a new trend and many hosts arn't keeping up.

Pricing: Related to the above, you have to keep up with competitors pricewise, don't worry about staying up with people like hostgator.com, they oversell quite spectacularly:P however, customers like to feel they are getting a good deal. Press your reseller all the time for lower prices, they can usually afford to give lower prices and bandwidth/space gets cheaper over time, dont forget about the specs, i recommend keeping the price the same all the time but just upgrading the accounts.

Legal: Stay the hell away from illegal things, it may be tempting if you are not doing brilliantly and someone offers a great price if they can host warez, the legal repercussions if you get caught are huge ($350,000 miniu and ban from hosting) bear in mind the odds of getting caught hosting warez is high, it is far higher than getting caught downloading warez, the music industrie activly seek warez sites before tracking down their host and suing them.
Adult sites i also suggest you dont host, the border between legal/illegal is very fine and you will regularly have to check up on them to check they are not breaking the law. They also tarnish your image, it does not look good on your part if your found to be hosting an adult site.

Make sure you keep ALL your customers happy, an unhappy customer can ruin your buisness, they can post bad reviews all over the internet and people will avoid you, many hosts seem to only care about attracting new customers, they seem to forget about their current customers, this is a big no no.

Money: Give your customers different ways to pay and reward bulk payments (yearly, 6 monthly) also have automated billing, forget this and you could end up a very very busy person, it also removes human error. I personally use paypal, most people have it and my reseller accepts. Carefull not to skimp, yes its tempting to oversell but be carfull, like I said, ruin you. Make sure you take everything into account, paypal charges, support bills, the actual hosting ect.. At the end of the day you need to make a profit, but too high charges put off customers, its all about striking a balance.

Uptime: Make sure you have this covered, needless to say, if your website is down it hardly inspires confidence in your customer that there site is going to be up all the time. My advice, if you uptime is below 98.5% and your a paid host dont mention actual figures, if you are a free host you can probably get away with 95% before having to keep quite. To avoid downtime make sure your server is not overloaded, putting more than 200 sites on one server is a good way to ruin your uptime, the cpu usage goes sky high and you either being kicked off by your reseller for overusing system resources and or have your customers walking.

If your resellers uptime falls below what they guarantee, your in trouble. I suggest changing reseller if this happens regularly or try getting your money back, you will probably have to give your customers their money back if they notice.

Proffesionalism: Jan has a point, speaking in l33tspeak does put of customers, make sure if you are using im as a means of communication with customers your image/name is nothing obscene talk in english, i also recommend using a spellchecker, im not being patronising, it really helps, for example I would never write this for a client, its full of errors and gives the client the impression that their host is a 12 year old hacker hosting them from his 20 year old 2 gig hd 64mb ram pc in his room. Be polite, at the end of the day the customer hands out the money, kiss their feet, your wage depends on it.

I hope this helps,
Fish.

[d-w host]

:classic2: wow

[Koh]

lol nexgen, try making paragraph, my eye hurts

[nex-gen host]

:D Sorry, I've added some paragraphs, I hope this helps all potential hosts anc customers, it may help kiddie hosts realise what their getting into before starting up and shutting down 1 week later...

[Ako]

@ next-gen-host

Great tutorial ;)

@ NewBeginner

No need to buy a plane for starting a reseller business:biggrin2: ... Just buy one from one of the reputable FWS companies and follow to what nex-gen host said.

[nex-gen host]

lol, mabye he was offering a plane for a reseller host?:D

[Koh]

bad english probably, seen alot lately

[NewBeginner]

nex-gen host , thanx very much for ur pro. article ,,

but what is the best ways to promote my reseller ?

[LSComputers]

Normally you wouldnt advertise who your reseller is, becuase chances are there prices and support would be better then yours.

[nex-gen host]

glad to be able to help newbeginner. If I have understood this correctly, you are trying to promote your reseller hosting (you provide space/band for people to host other people) I suggest to promote it in the same way as you would with an ordinary host, however there are special forums dedicated to reseller hosting, google it and post on a few. On your homepage under all the the normal options put something like, want to host other peoples websites? Click here for a reseller account. People often know what they want but need a little direction in finding it.

Get a free host. Find someone here who is looking for a free reseller.
Sounds dumb? Its not, get an arrangment like I have with my host, he has ads on my forum in return I can hand out free packages. You will need the right sort of person though, I am, I know for a fact my host makes money off our arrangment, however, pick the wrong type of person and you stand to make a loss, make sure their not abusing your hosting (handing it out in return for nothing, I for example require forum posts). This can help generate revenue, and mabye even get the free host to put something like "powered by blah blah blah" Unless you offer free hosting (and are therefore competition) then you should be fine.

Hope this helps,
Fish

[WL-Michael]

Hmm,

Good. But, this may or may not have been said. Bluntly, know where you want to go and what you are doing before you ever join this industry, frankly, there are way too many beanheads running around with not one clue about what they are doing. I could go on and on about things like this but I'd prefer not to.

Just know where you want to go and what you want to do, if you dont know what you are doing then you really should question yourself as to if you should keep your "day-job" if you have one.

Regards

[nex-gen host]

never quit the day job:D Hosts are slow to get moving.

[Brandon]

never quit the day job:D Hosts are slow to get moving.
Correct.
Always keep your day job, even after you are steady, it brings in some extra cash to pay bills.