Most small businesses in Australia at the moment are feeling the pressure. Pressure to reinvent their products, bring in more revenue and grow their client base.  Most Businesses have exhausted all forms of reinvention of their existing products and sevices and are looking to see  how they can add value to their existing customers.

There has always been a great opportunity for Web designers, Developers and consultants to compliment their core business by providing web hosting services to their client base. However it was never seen as a core business and rarely was the hosting product given the attention it deserved. Today I am going to show you how you can increase your exising reseller hosting revenue or create a brand new revenue stream for your business.

Back in 2003, Crucial Paradigm’s founder Aaron began  the company as a Web design Business. As a second revenue stream Aaron decided to start to offer hosting to Crucial’s web design clients. Soon enough those clients who had their websites designed by Crucial began to refer other clients to Crucial. Very quickly the business began to provide more and more hosting services until in late 2004 , Aaron decided he would focus the business primarily on hosting and no longer provide web design services. Today Crucial is a leading provider of reseller hosting services is Australia and overseas with over 1,000 Resellers that include web designers and other hosting companies.

Here are 5 Simple Steps to Creating that additional revenue stream from Reseller Hosting for your web design, development or consultancy Business.

1.  Picking a Domain Name:

When marketing the hosting service to their clients some designers, developers will simply add a menu item to their existing website and advertise the fact they now offer hosting services, I think you can take this a step further why not register a domain with your existing brands name with the addition of the word hosting.  For example Four Square Design would register www.foursqaurehosting.com.au You are still using your existing brand but there is a clear distinction that this is your hosting product. Domains can be purchased for as low as $12.95/year

2. Install WordPress and attach a Theme

We all know how busy web designers, developers and consultants are, its often the case you are so busy designing other clients websites your website is left to last. Therefore I am suggesting the quickest and easiest way to generate this additional income with minum effort is to customise and already built theme. This will save you the time and energy and have your web hosting reseller business up and running in a number of hours.

Here are some great themes for your reseller hosting business from themeforest, there are a number of prebuilt themes that will work great with a little bit of customisation

Quick Host Reseller Hosting WordPress Theme

• http://themeforest.net/item/quick-host-business-and-hosting-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/1598158

Phenomenon Reseller Hosting WordPress Theme

• http://themeforest.net/item/phenomenon-premium-hosting-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/150123

HostingSquare – Hosting WordPress Theme

• http://themeforest.net/item/hostingsquare-hosting-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/142578

Basic: 25 x $60/Month = $1500

Premium: 10 x $70/Month = $700

Expert: 5 x $80/Month = $400

Grand Total = $2600/Month

As you can see by providing hosting to your existing clients you can make an up to an additional $2600/Month. You are already their trusted advisor as a designer or developer. They will appreciate the value you have provided them by giving them access to excellent hosting.

Your Hosting Packages you can decide the pricing and inclusions

4. Choosing your reseller package

You must select the correct reseller hosting package. The last thing you want to do is extend your product range by providing hosting to your valued clients only for the hosting to continually be down or slow.  You need to look for high performance, highly available reseller packages. Traditionally Reseller hosting was on a single dedicated server, a small portion of that server was allocated to each individual reseller who then sold it on to their clients.

In 2012 you now have cloud reseller hosting packages. These type of packages are created using cloud technologies, they are built for customers who need hosting to be available all the time. Crucial’s range of reseller plans use the same HP SAN and blade infrastructure as our enterprise grade Cloud VPS products. This gives you the peace of mind knowing your clients are not going to need much support and will see your hosting services as realiable and also provide high perforamance for their websites.

You must make sure you get adequate resources alot of reseller packages will also bundle some scripts which will enable you to add even more value to you clients. Fanatastico is bundled with crucials reseller plans and allows you to plug-in extensions such as Joomla and WordPress with ease.  Make sure the company you purchase your reseller plans has a solid support program for you as the reseller including 24/7 support methods so you are never left waiting to contact support if and when you need to .

5. What to do next?

Once you have decided on a package call or email the company and introduce yourself let them know you are starting out and wanting to provide hosting to your clients. We love getting calls from new reseller customers and we always use the opportunity to help that small business grow their hosting business. We make sure they can rely on us and our support to help them succeed with reselling our hosting services. We like to consider these resellers partners in helping us achieve our company purpose of helping everyone succeed online.

Over the next few weeks make sure you follow us , we are going to go into some more trade secrets of Reselling hosting and also talk about best practices for growing your reseller business.