How to Start a Web Hosting
Business in Nigeria

by

*Prosper Ebere*

⏳
Many people want to start a personal web hosting business sitting in
the confinements of their home; while some of them feel that it’s not
a very realistic idea, others even manage to generate thousands of
dollars merely by reselling the hosting packages of top hosting firms
such as HostGator, FatCow, JustHost, and the likes of them. There
are two things to focus on; the first one is promoting and marketing
your new start-up business and attracting more customers, and the
second one is choosing the right kinds of reseller hosting plans that
can be easily used by anyone to seamlessly set-up a new hosting
business without any technical know-how. Knowledge of running
servers is a vast topic in itself and is not covered here.
If you are able to get several back-to-back clients then running a web
hosting business can be quite lucrative. That being said, you would
pretty soon realize that the market is extremely competitive and big
dogs already have the bigger pies of the market, making it more and
more difficult for smaller firms to establish themselves or even
survive for too long. Attracting natural traffic from search engines
would be another tough nut to crack, as buying visitors through
something like Google AdWords may not give you the expected return
on the investments that you make.

SELL AND BUY WEBSITES AT E-AUCTIONS

There is no need to lose hope as still there are enough ways through
which, you can get the job done. One of the best ways is to sell and
buy websites on different auction websites. Free hosting for one
month, 6 months or 1 year can be offered with every single website
that you sell online. This way, your listings will easily stand out,
attract higher bids and generate more profits too. These kinds of
marketing strategies will also attract the customers who are thinking
of renewing their hosting plan after the free hosting period of your
package is over.

LEVERAGE THE BENEFITS OF of WORDPRESS

WordPress is a totally free and easy-to-use platform for making
simple, free blog hosting websites. You can add your personal links
to these free blogs created by people. This can help you in
generating revenue and promoting your service along with selling
upgraded packages to customers who have free accounts. You can
also try to build and create new relationships with web designers, and
different developers who develop small CMS scripts.

BECOME A RESELLER

Even if you do not know anything about hosting, you need not worry,
because, with the help of reseller hosting programs, you can still
start your hosting business. In other words, you can purchase hosting
packages at wholesale prices and market them at higher prices, just
as in the case of any other business. This way, you can focus on the
marketing front, and leave the technical aspects to people who know
how to deal with the technicalities.

YOU DON’T NEED TO to BE A GREAT DESIGNER

Even if you are not good at web design skills for creating your own
websites to sell your hosting plans, you can still manage to do so by
making use of private label programs as most of them are free to
use. They offer you with different templates and a dedicated control
panel that can help you in building your website in a matter of just a
few minutes.

KEEP A HEALTHY MIX OF SERVICES IN YOUR
PORTFOLIO

This is where most of the newbies go wrong; reseller hosting doesn’t
mean that you should only resell the shared hosting packages. If you
sell just one hosting package, customers will always find something
to be fishy, and they’ll realize very soon that you’re merely a reseller!
While there’s nothing wrong in that, folks often prefer to buy the
hosting packages directly from the main company than through a
reseller or affiliate, because they know that you’d be getting a good
margin as the middle-man.
On the other hand, if you pay decent
attention to branding, and offer a healthy mix of hosting services
ranging from budget hosting packages, business hosting packages,
multiple-domain hosting down to VPS, then you won’t run into such
problems, and most of your customers will never come to know that
you’re merely a hosting reseller. So, go ahead and give it a go; who
knows you may be able to actually generate a lot more money than
your 9-6 job, working as a hosting reseller!