Wednesday, March 12, 2008

So, You Want to Do Web Hosting

Does your dream of having an online business involve providing Web services to other business and organizations? Have you thought that being the Web host could provide you with an income stream? Or do you have so many web sites now that you're wondering if providing your own hosting service would be more cost effective than what you're paying now?

Well, you're on to something. Many entrepreneurs have found that small business owners want and need Web sites, but know little or nothing about how to go about getting their business online. Others who make their money through affiliate programs they promote on sites they build can quickly expand beyond the capacity of their hosting service. When one Web site turns into a dozen different sites promoting different products and services, the cost of all that hosting can really mount up.

Only a few years ago, your options were to pay a bundle to have your site hosted or spend a bundle of hours running your own server. Rolling your own server farm is less attractive now because competition in hosting services has dramatically lowered the cost of simply purchasing the service. Many small operators have Cable, DSL or satellite broadband services that prohibit servers anyway.

Here are a couple of options that you may find attractive for launching your business. First is a reseller hosting account from Hosting With Us. This company has a lot of low cost hosting plans, but the hosting solution called reseller accounts is the most intriguing. As you might guess, a reseller account is designed for users who plan to divvy up the storage and bandwidth of their account and resell it as smaller accounts to other users. Or use it themselves to host multiple domains.

The beauty of these reseller accounts is that you can host unlimited domains for one low price that starts at $24.95 a month as of this writing. For that fee, you get 4.5 GB of disk space and 45 GB of transfer per month. Transfer is the bandwidth demand generated by visitors to your Web sites.

The reseller accounts offer a Web Host Manager that lets you create individual accounts and give each one a portion of disk space and transfer bandwidth. You can put a dozen or two dozen small business domains on your reseller account and charge each one enough to make a handsome profit each month. Each account gets it own email addresses, databases and autoresponders as needed. Merchant accounts can be added for ecommerce. Your customers each get a control panel for their sub-account so they can manage files and use pre-installed scripts.

You may find that you can generate even more income by building and managing Web sites for your clients. In this case, you control the complete reseller account and all the sub-accounts. You design the sites using Web building tools and upload code to your account.

If you are skilled in the use of tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver, all you need is a reseller account and you're in business. But what if you want to build custom Web sites for customers without having to invest a fortune in Web design software and the learning curve to become proficient in graphic design? What you need is site building and hosting solution.

WebBizBuilder.com offers a browser based site builder. You don't need to know anything about HTML or be a whiz and graphics. This tool is based on pre-designed templates that you customize. You can change colors, content, graphics, and so on. There are dozens and dozens of templates to choose from for all different kinds of business. They all have a couple of things in common. You can create a site quickly & easily and they all look professional. Get some text and pictures from your customer and soon you'll be able to go back to them with a live site. Basic sites start at $19.95 a month, a price you can mark up to sell. For $49.95 a month you can add an Internet store with a catalog of 500 products.

Regardless of whether you want multiple domain hosting or an online point and click site building solution, getting your business online has never been easier or less expensive.



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