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Affiliate or Reseller?

A reseller account will cost you £20-£50/month

You will get 100% of the money if you are the reseller, however, you will have to field the 1st line calls from your users.

If you have good hosting knowledge and the time to respond to their needs, then you will make more money as a percentage reseller, but you will need to convince people that your company is better than your rivals.

If you want to work on occassion and "set and forget" your campaigns and never have to deal with end customers, the an affiliate account is your thing.
Remember you can be an affiliate for more than one company, where it's a bit more competitive to be a host.
 
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Affiliate makes less money as compared with reseller so if you have the decent budget and users then start reselling the products. 🙂
 
As @ughosting said, if you are willing to invest your time for more potential earning potential, choose reseller. If you want an autopilot solution, go affiliate.
 
Hello,

If you are good in Marketing and have good contacts with relevant field of hosting , then I must say that you should go with reseller plans.

Thanks !!
 
I also think for you to start with you are probably better off starting by reselling their services first. You are always better off starting smaller and then see where that takes you and remember you can always grow which is better to do at a smaller scale.
 
It really depends on if you're able to operate a hosting service. I believe going the affiliate path will be much easier and will not require as much work.
 
I personally prefer the affiliate route, if the commission structure is good, and I can get the volume. Getting $1/mo/acct means I'd need 1,000 accounts just to even start to make it worth my time, however that means it's recurring every month too, so getting 50 accounts at $1 each, means $600/year. Sadly, that's not even enough to cover my cell phone bill.

That said, there are plenty of places that offer anywhere from 200-500% of the first month's signup, so at $15 * 500% = $75 per signup, that's a quick way to boost things.

If you decide to go the reseller route, there's quite a few expenses to take into consideration:
* Server fees (and location)
* Billing software
* Credit Card processing/fees
* Incorporation or Business Licneses
* Bank account fees
* Accounting & Taxes
* Legal support (yes, you SHOULD have a lawyer review things)
* Support software (tickets etc)
* Phone Support
* Staff (or your time)
* Troubleshooting (skills)
* Communication

And all of these fees are ignoring the advertising, website design, and promotion that you have yet to do.

Probably the biggest failure that I see with resellers is the delay in getting an issue resolved. Either they don't have the skills to troubleshoot it, or their host that they use is slow on response. So a client submits a ticket to you at 1pm, you read and finally send it up the chain by 3pm, their staff has a 4 hour response time before even LOOKING into the issue, now it's 7pm. It's nearly 10pm by the time they respond, you decide to go to bed and don't get the response until 8am the next day, send it to the client who then gets the issue resolved.

Now that's a great/worst case scenario. What happens if the hosting company asks a question, then you have to go down & up the chain again, creating further delays. Each delay (especially if the website is down) runs an exponentially higher chance that the user will leave and move to a more stable hosting company.

So each has their risks/rewards. When I first started back in the 90's, I had a reseller account until I had I think 20 accounts - at that point, I leased a server directly and *I* was the host. I ran at an operating loss as I was still trying to figure things out, and learn server management etc. By the time I was done (17 years later), I had hundreds of VPS instances and servers.

At the end of the day, it's all about "white glove service". If you treat each customer like they're you're #1 customer, they will treat you the same. Afterall, the only reason that you're in business is because of them!
 
There's some huge money to be made using affiliate programs, either getting up front rewards or recurring commissions. I personally like lifetime residual income, especially if my referrals stay with the provider 2, 3 or more years.
 
If you are looking for a long term business then Reseller is the way to go, if you want to do it short term then affiliate is the way to go, affiliate also has good revenue depending upon what kind of affiliate traffic you can generate and also which providers you refer.
 
I would say this depends on your knowledge and what exactly your looking at doing. An affiliate can make good money over time if you have a way of getting the ads out there. But if you have local clients looking for hosting and this is an area of interest and your willing to put in the time and maybe some money then a reseller is the way to go. Good luck
 
Both are profitable but Resellers can earn more profit and can earn for long term.

According to one of survey, Many customer return within 6 month. So Affiliate will not earn money If that customer will return after discontinuing your referred product.

You can increase price of your product but with affiliate you will be need to depend on Reseller commission.
 
It depends on what skills you are good at it, both require different skills to it, indeed they both need good marketing skills and way to do it but if you know-how on the server side and technical part, it would be a bonus for you to own a server to resell it. Resell server is like you're bringing a product and resell it, is depends on how you sell this product and the services that you provide.
 
It depends upon your business approach, there is way more money in reselling as you can establish your own brand and can setup your own pricing and your brand can grow up too, however it depends upon your budget, resources and your business needs ..
 
If you are really looking forward to start a BUSINESS... be a Reseller, but consider these factors:

1. Money - Always have some Capital to start, always have something in reserve.
2. Time - Do you have an allocated dedicated time for this?
3. Knowledge of hosting requirements, troubleshooting, etc....
4. Marketing - Do you know where to market your hosting services?

If not, just go on being an affiliate, its less much hassle 🙂
 
RyeHost said:
If you are really looking forward to start a BUSINESS... be a Reseller, but consider these factors:

1. Money - Always have some Capital to start, always have something in reserve.
2. Time - Do you have an allocated dedicated time for this?
3. Knowledge of hosting requirements, troubleshooting, etc....
4. Marketing - Do you know where to market your hosting services?

If not, just go on being an affiliate, its less much hassle 🙂
Click to expand...

Affliate or Reseller you still need the 4 points you list
 
Whether to become an affiliate and earn money or become a reseller and earn money completely depends on you.

Affiliate
An affiliate needs to sign up for the affiliate program, start posting the banner and text ads on other websites and when anyone purchases the product from those ads he earn a commission.

But there's a risk in affiliate marketing too.
Not Getting Paid: Sometimes the affiliate marketers don't get paid for the commission they are entitled for after sending the sales or leads to the retailer.

Retractions of Commissions: It's a common thing to see commission retractions that means what you see in your account isn't essentially you receive. This can happen with the affiliate programs that allow you to earn leads but expect those to turn into sales.

There are many more risks you will find that an affiliate has to face.

Reseller

While to become a reseller you simply need to buy the reseller hosting plan, redesign the packages as per your requirement and start selling web hosting services.
The server management responsibility is take by the web host from whom you have taken the hosting.
Also, their support team helps to resolve the clients' queries keeping you focused on your business.

So, its completely on you whether to become an affiliate or a reseller.
 
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