Establishing Your Brand Identity

There are countless web hosting sites competing for search engine ranking and recognition.  Branding helps you create that distinct character that enables your service to stand out from the rest.  But you must first be able to identify the demographics and preferences of your target market.  Online branding to be successful should always be hinged on a clear and concise perception of your market. Your website being your first point of contact with your clients should also be calibrated towards your brand.   Below are some of the things that you have to remember when building your corporate website design:

• Choice of Colors. Colors are more than just aesthetics. Each color conveys a mood or a feeling and it is essential that you correlate the colors you use your message.
• Emotions.  Your website’s content should also convey the emotion that you want your brand to project. This should also be in conjunction with your choice of colors to achieve the maximum impact.
• Consistency.  Consistency could be in various forms like fonts being used, choice of colors and emotions that should all reflect your brand’s character and personality.
• Tone.  Your tone of voice should also be reflective of the brand’s character and personality as well as your target market’s personality.  If your target market is the executives and senior managers, then your tone should be mirrored towards them.  If your target market is made up mostly of women, then your tone of voice should be reflective of that particular market segment.
• Distinct and unique.  Online branding is all about setting yourself apart from other web hosting sites. A unique approach, an exceptionally remarkable service and an impressive website will convey a unique brand character and personality.

The success and popularity of web hosting sites is not completely dependent on online branding.  For it to work, the service should be able to address the primary need of the market and other features of the service should also be considered like pricing, infrastructure and trustworthiness. An attractive pricing scheme, a reliable service and dependable infrastructure plus an effective corporate branding campaign including a great web design will do wonders for your web hosting business.

Your Time

So there is money investment, and there is time investment. You can expect to spend about one full work week or about 40 hours to get a solid reseller hosting company from zero to complete. This includes making a business plan, buying all the necessary items, setting up everything, and finally opening your doors to the internet. Of course you can do all this in less than 10 hours if you have the expertise to create your own website and graphics.

As far as time needed on a daily basis after setting up, you should spend about an hour a day doing routine checks, writing articles to grow your website and attract potential customers, and answering support questions. All of this you can outsource, and I will explain how in the coming lessons.

Your Money

With your time investment, you can spend nothing if you have the necessary expertise or if you’re willing to spend some time learning everything. However if you have no experience at all, you can still start your own hosting company if you have the funds to hire workers and have them do all the necessary work.

Once you have your hosting company up and active, you can expect to pay the following fees on a yearly or monthly basis; reseller hosting fees, SSL certificate fees, and dynamic IP address fees.

Also, you should expect to wait at least 4-5 months to recoup all your expenses and start profiting from your residual income business. The income you generate from early on should either be re-invested into your hosting company or used to pay off past/future expenses.

Reseller Hosting Account

First you need to purchase the actual space that you are going to resell, so take a look my top 4 recommended companies below, and decide which one fits your needs and budget. All 4 are highly reputable web hosting companies.

1. Host Gator
2. Just Host
3. Host Clear
4. Super Green Reseller Hosting

Domain Name

Now you need a domain name to attach to your account. Your hosting company site will also be hosted on your reseller account, so buy a domain from one of the two companies below.

1. GoDaddy
2. Netfirms

Method of Payment Collection

How do you want to collect payment from your customers? There is a quick free way to get started and another option to consider once you start growing big.

1. First option is to go free by using PayPal or Google Checkout. Just sign up at either places and then hold tight. No monthly fees here, just per transaction fees.
2. The alternative (and something to consider when you grow big), is to setup a credit card terminal on your site so the whole payment process is done on your site. With this option, you keep the customer on your site and get to brand the whole process, but there is a monthly fee and transaction fee included.

Your Own Design

Your new reseller hosting company is as unique as you make it, meaning your design has to stand out from the crowd or you’ll look like another generic hosting company. There are detailed tips that I cover later on, but having a solid website design and logo will help you brand your company, and make it stand out from the others.

1. Themeforest – For Pre-made Templates
2. 99 Designs – For Cheap Logo Design
3. oDesk – Find Freelance Designers

Security Measures

Potential customers will expect to have a safe and secure checkout process, as well as secured login to their special clients-only area, and cPanel area. You can take care of all this by simply buying and installing a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. I use GoDaddy SSL, works like it should, and its only $12.99 for the first year!

1. GoDaddy SSL Certificate

Support System

When you purchase your reseller hosting package, there are a couple tools to help you help your customers. They are, the support contact form, knowledgebase, and “frequently asked questions” pages. The support contact form can be setup so your customers can send specific questions to certain divisions like sales or support. Knowledgebase is simply an area where customers can browse to answer their own questions, and the F.A.Q. page works in almost the same way. Need a more robust support system? Check out my recommendations..

1. Kayako
2. Omnistar

Got everything? Head over to the next article “What To Expect“, to continue.

It’s not as hard as you might think, and it takes very little to get started. However, because its so easy to enter the market, its quite saturated with junk hosts that provide bad hosting experience with little to no support. Good thing you found Reseller Hosting Programs, where we will guide you on the right path to creating a legitimate web hosting company.

Reseller Hosting Programs is designed as an online e-book website, where you go from chapter to chapter. Once you finish from start to end, you can then use the site as a tool of reference to go back to pages and re-read and re-think the reseller hosting process to make your own web hosting company unique.

What is Reseller Hosting?

In one sentence, its where you buy a chunk of disk space and bandwidth (at wholesale price) from a large web hosting company, and sell it back on your website to people who need it.

Who is it for?

Anyone willing to work a bit to generate passive income! A large amount of reseller hosting companies are built by web design companies who have clients wanting to be hosted with them. So there’s a demand, and it gets filled in. That’s the quickest way to residual income, but if you don’t have a web design company or any client list to work with, you can build a brand new web hosting company and market it via PPC and SEO.

Why should I start my own hosting company?

Yes the hosting market is quite saturated with companies, but alot of them are just sitting online and not generating much income, because of poor design, poor pricing plans, and poor support. But if you work hard and offer good support (and read this website to the core), then you have a great chance of making some good residual income. There is always someone who wants hosting, why not grab them and take them to your hosting company?

What do I need?

Very little actually. The core of Reseller Hosting is purchasing a chunk of disk space and bandwidth from a reseller hosting company, and being able to collect payment. More details here..

Where do I start?

To begin, head over to the list of reseller hosting companies, visit their individual sites and review which company meets your budget and preference. Then decide if you want to accept payment via PayPal (free), or a payment gateway (has a monthly fee, and per transaction fee). More information here..

After reading this introduction, if you think starting your own reseller hosting company is right for you, then click here to continue to the next chapter.