This article is Part II of II in a series about reseller web hosting. In Part I of the article, I discussed reseller hardware, hosting plans, and the role of control panels. Here in Part II I will talk about reseller hosting in terms of support considerations, branding/transparency, and briefly mention backups.
Support Considerations. As a reseller you will be often supporting your own clients, but you have the hosting company available to help you out. So if a client has a problem they ask you, and if you need to escalate the problem, the hosting company will help you. In this way the customer only deals with you. Personally I like this option because my clients trust me, and I like to have total control over my brand. I don’t want someone who I haven’t trained or worked with interacting with my clients.
The other support option is what’s called “white label hosting support”. In this model, your clients can call tech support themselves, but the client isn’t told that they are speaking to the web hosting company’s staff, as opposed to your staff. This is also a good model, though I haven’t seen it very often in my travels.
Branding and Transparency. Many reseller programs will allow you to be completely “white label”. This basically means that the web hosting company’s name is replaced by your company’s name for the most of what the client will see; instead of having the web hosting company’s nameservers, you will have nameservers that match the name of your business (you can do the same thing with mailsevers because your names as basically just aliases). There are some instances, however, where the client may still see the web hosting providers company name instead of yours (e.g. especially with SSLs and control panel logins). So it’s important that you take this transparency issue into consideration — with some digging it’s not too difficult to find out that you are a reseller. But again it all depends on your clients, their knowledge level, and their expectations.
Backup Considerations. I’m not going to get into too much detail, here, but make sure that you have a backup plan in place. I am planning a future post about the backup options you have as a reseller.
The only thing worse than losing your own data, is losing your clients data.
Armed with this information, you can now make informed decisions about reseller web hosting options and reseller web hosting plans.
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