Reselling Hosting vs Promoting Affiliate Hosting Products

[Bony3D]

Hello from Spain everybody!
I was a sidewalk employee who lived paycheck to paycheck until quite recently.
For about a year now I have been promoting as affiliate products and services of several hosting companies, which pay me large commissions ranging from 50 to 150 dollars per sale.
Right now I earn a lot more money than I did when I was employed.

But reading the book "The Millionaire FastLane " made me realize that I am playing a very dangerous game. The book itself speaks expressly that being an affiliate of a company leaves you out of control of the process and is like being a co-driver of a car that goes very fast.

Even though right now with affiliate marketing I'm making good amounts of money that allow me to live in a very comfortable way, I'm trying to find alternatives that allow me to have more control and be as faithful as possible to the 5 commandments preached by MJ in the book.

As I have been promoting hosting services as an affiliate for some time now, I have been able to see that in this case there is a demand for this type of product, so the commandment of necessity is fulfilled and that I am also good at selling.

To try to get out of the affiliate trap, I'm thinking instead of promoting the services of these companies, better to create my own hosting company as a reseller and promote my own hosting services under my own brand.

But here comes my big doubt...
Does reselling hosting under my own brand is better and more fastlane than being an affiliate? Or is it getting out of a bad place to get me into something worse?
From my point of view being a reseller of hosting fulfills well 4 of the 5 commandments (need, access, control, scalability), but fails in the commandment of time, because the customer service would have to provide me, and being a service that requires being active 24/7/365 I'm seeing myself all day answering customer support tickets (my customers would be people who are learning to make themselves their website, so they have a lot of doubts that will have to be resolved).

I'm very worried about getting into a business that consumes me all the time.

Is there anyone who has experimented with this type of business who can give me any advice on this?
I would like to know what you think about how much or how little fastlane this type of hosting reselling business is about affiliate marketing or whether I should think better about another type of product.

Thank you so much

 

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[Dezzamondo]

As you've probably seen already, the hosting market is saturated with resellers still, but since you've already been making a tidy income from promoting other people's hosting services perhaps you'd be able to successfully recycle all of the work you've done already and redirect traffic to your own branded hosting reseller account.

One of the problems with hosting at the moment is that there is such a LOW barrier to entry. Some resellers are so desperate for business that they'll give away reseller accounts under their own failing brands at stupidly low prices like 99 cents, or whatever. As you already mentioned with affiliate marketing, there's an additional loss of the element of control with becoming a hosting reseller. What happens if the servers go down for maintenance? Is there 24/hr support that you can use? Are your customers able to use them too?

On the other hand, there are plugins for most major reseller providers for turn-key solutions like WHMCS which makes life a lot easier.

Good points

• Easy to sell if you're already offering complimentary services like web dev/design.
• Relatively cheap to run.
• Plenty of cpanel plugins and customisations available.
• Plenty of specialist providers (i.e. I use a UK provider that specialises in optimised Wordpress hosting, as well as Linux and Windows servers).
• You already have a pipeline of sales links and methods you can divert to your own service.
• You don't have to manage any infrastructure.
• You can add personnel to manage customer service for you once you have enough MRR to support it.

Not-so-good points

• Low barrier to entry. ("Get started for 99c!")
• Lack of control - Server maintenance; Buying from a reseller, that bought from a reseller and one of them decides to close their account; ICANN domain prices change (I bought a .hosting domain for £75 one year, before being quoted £300 the next...)
• If their customer service is substandard then you've got no hope.
• If the shared servers are attacked or not load balanced properly, you've got no hope.
• The market is highly competitive.

Assuming you can position yourself well enough, there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to make it work. The company I use only appeared a couple of years ago and are the best company I've hosted with... so far. You already have the sales experience in the field, so you're already ahead of most of your competition.

If you genuinely think you could make it work, bite the bullet and try. Even if it fails, it will teach you a lot. If it succeeds, well, then you've got yourself a new source of income AND you might learn something. Having us tell you to do or not do something is irrelevant. It's up to you, your gut and making your own mind up.

Good luck either way!