One of the very popular ways of making money online is by becoming a hosting provider. Anyone can start a web hosting company without having to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars towards the purchase of servers, by buying reseller plans from hosting companies that have already established themselves in the industry.

The way reseller hosting works is that an entrepreneur buys hosting services from companies like InMotion Hosting, Bluehost and JustHost, who have sterling reputations for being the best in the business. It is important that they are good at what they do, because the resellers can then pass on the guarantees that are provided by the companies onto their customers. Once resellers have bought the hosting companies’ services at a wholesale price, they can then proceed to sell them to their own customers for a profit. The resellers can optionally rent a whole server and then apportion its resources or buy pre-packaged shared hosting services that are offered by the parent company.

Reselling web hosting can be an ideal business for web design companies or independent website developers who can also offer their clients a hosting service in addition to their finished websites. Instead of paying for the premium prices that are quoted by the bigger companies, the clients will have cheap, affordable plans at their disposal without compromising on quality of service. The resellers on the other hand will be able to offer web hosting services to their clients without having to worry about the day-to-day running of the servers. In case any hardware, software or connectivity issues arise, they can simply forward them hosting companies for addressing and resolution.

Web hosting resellers can earn good profits by investing in a good advertising campaign. At present, reselling is one of the most sought after online business and the trend is set to continue because the number of websites will continue to increase and every single website needs a hosting provider. Let us take a look at three of the best reseller hosting providers and what they have to offer:

InMotion Hosting

InMotion offers its reseller hosting services to its clients at a very reasonable price, starting at $13.99 per month and includes 60 GB of disk space and 600 GB of bandwidth per month. Included in their packages are features that enable clients to handle billing and support ticket requests. With a few configurations, they will be able to install solutions that enable them to accept payments from major payment gateways like PayPal and Google Checkout. They will be able to accept various currencies, create invoices and even offer prices at promotional rates.

Some hosting providers charge their reseller clients for cPanel; InMotion offers the control panel for free (both to the resellers and their clients down the line). The same goes for Softaculous (an auto-installation software) that the clients can use to setup their websites with the click of a few buttons. Backups, automatically done every 24 to 36 hours, are also free.

Another free feature is the reselling of domain names. The clients aren’t charged for the purchase of domain names by their clients – InMotion does the purchasing. Once resellers have bought the service they can start running their business under their own brand names – customers will never know that they are actually being serviced by a reselling company.

Bluehost

Bluehost is one of the most popular reseller hosting providers of choice. They offer very competitive prices (starting at $19.95 per month for 100 GB of disk space and network speeds of 15 Mbps). The company offers some unique features in its reseller programs. They believe that the trick to having a satisfied customer is by making everything easy to work with and this makes it the reseller program of choice for people that aren’t too tech savvy. Clients are given control and management tools like WHMCS and ClientExec that allow for customized hosting plans, handling of cash flow with an automated billing service and make it a breeze to handle customer services and support. Each account comes with unlimited email accounts, auto-responders, forwarding aliases and email storage.

JustHost

JustHost joins the list with a slightly higher price ($19.95 per month) but comes with plenty of goodies for the resellers. The two words JustHost seems to prefer are “unlimited” and “free”. That’s right – almost every feature they have on offer is either unlimited, free or both.

The free features include:

• cPanel to control the configuration and running of websites.
• Simple Scripts Automatic Installer for the installation of packages.
• WHM (Web Host Manager) control panel that is used to automate server management tasks and control the creation and editing of hosting plans, allocation of disk space, bandwidth and email accounts.
• Auto Billing to create, modify and suspend customer accounts.

Meanwhile, the unlimited features include:

• Unlimited numbers of accounts per plan, number of domains hosted, sub domains allowed as add-ons and MySQL databases.
• An unlimited number of cPanel accounts.

Overall, these three companies lead the market by being the best reselling hosting providers out there, and it’s quite easy to see why.