6 Benefits of Reseller Hosting for Digital Agencies

As a digital agency, your success will depend largely on your ability to stay flexible, find new and creative ways to upsell and keep your services aligned with client demands.

Extending contracts and offering advanced versions of your core services can be a great way to develop relationships with your clients. However, many agencies miss potential upselling opportunities by neglecting complementary services, such as reseller hosting.

If you’re curious about expanding your service offerings and giving your clients a more well-rounded experience, here’s a closer look at reseller hosting and how it can benefit your agency.

What is reseller hosting?

Before we get into why you might want to integrate reseller hosting into your services, let’s take a brief look at what reseller hosting is.

To put it simply, reseller hosting is a service that allows you to sell hosting solutions from the owners of servers. You pay a monthly fee for the reseller account and have complete control over pricing, giving you the ability to determine your own profit margins. 

Rather than owning and maintaining the heavy infrastructure needed to maintain a hosting service, this is taken care of entirely by the original hosting provider. Allowing you, the web hosting reseller, to focus on simply selling the service and offering basic support to the end user.

With reseller hosting, you can provide a more comprehensive service for your clients and open up a new revenue stream without having to accommodate the demanding setup and maintenance that comes with running your own web hosting service.

Though there are various types of reseller hosting, a reseller’s responsibilities to the end user (in this case, your agency’s clients) will generally include:

• Liaising with the original hosting providers on questions regarding the server’s performance, security, and capacity for global sites.
• Facilitating scalability to ensure the hosting plan keeps up with your client’s wants and needs.
• Providing basic technical support to help client sites recover from problems quickly and maximize their uptime.

By thoroughly understanding the type of hosting service you’re passing on to the end user, and making sure you can facilitate the kind of support they might need, you’ll be in a strong position to pitch your hosting service to your clients and ensure they have a positive experience.

Reseller Hosting vs. Other Hosting Solutions

Before deciding whether reseller hosting is right for your agency, it’s important to understand how it stacks up against other popular hosting options, like managed hosting and cloud hosting.

Each option will have pros and cons for your agency, depending on your unique circumstance and in-house technical capability. 

Managed Hosting

Managed hosting handles all of the technical aspects of server management for you, including: 

• Updates.
• Automatic backups.
• Performance monitoring. 

This is a great option for businesses with limited technical expertise, so it’s not always the best fit for digital agencies. Managed hosting can feel somewhat restrictive; offering less control over branding and pricing - making it more difficult to tailor packages to your clients’ needs or budgets.   

Cloud hosting

Cloud hosting is known for its scalability and flexibility, as websites are hosted across multiple servers rather than a single physical one. This is a great hosting option for businesses that experience unpredictable traffic spikes - such as eCommerce brands running seasonal promotions like Black Friday campaigns. 

Cloud hosting requires a larger upfront investment and technical expertise to set up correctly and maintain. It may be more challenging for digital agencies without an in-house team of IT specialists or agencies looking for a quick and easy way to expand their service offerings.  

6 Benefits of Reseller Hosting for Digital Agencies

Obviously, expanding your agency’s service offering isn’t a decision to be taken lightly, and you’ll need to consider the potential upside before you dedicate any time and resources toward reseller web hosting.

To help you make an informed decision, here’s six benefits of reseller hosting for digital agencies like yours.

Low Up-Front Investment

One of the best things about becoming a web hosting reseller is that the up-front investment is very low.

If you wanted to provide your clients with a hosting service that’s fully provided by your business, you’d have to own and operate a fairly complex infrastructure needed to host websites, including storage space, network connectivity, and maintenance that keeps servers running 24/7. This is all before thinking about additional requirements like becoming accredited as a domain registrar.

With reseller hosting, you’ll be able to leverage the infrastructure that’s already paid for and set up by an established provider, freeing up capital you can use to develop other areas of your agency.

Time Efficiency

Aside from saving yourself a large up-front investment required to set up a hosting service from scratch, reseller hosting partnerships will also save countless hours required to research your options, consult with experts, and ensure your hosting service is going to give you a healthy return on investment.

Reputable reseller hosting providers will come prepared with all the technical knowledge and experience you’ll need to get your new service offering up and running in a short timeframe.

When you bypass these kinds of complexities, you’ll save a lot of valuable time to invest in developing your hosting sales pitch, working on ongoing client contracts, or any other pressing tasks.

White Label Solutions

Many reseller hosting providers, such as 20i, provide white label reseller hosting allowing you to “create set packages & bespoke quotas”. These packages will carry your agency’s custom branding, and allow you to enable or disable features according to the unique needs of your target audience.

While many reseller hosting providers who don’t offer white label packages will still offer plenty of control over how you pass the service onto your clients, opting for a white label provider will give you the freedom to frame your hosting in a way that’s more organic to your brand identity, and craft more successful pitches.

Enhanced Security

As a digital agency, part of your work is going to involve making sure your client sites and other digital assets are secure from cybersecurity threats.

From malware hidden in pirated extensions to simple human error leading to insecure authentication, there’s no end to the threats you’ll have to contend with in order to keep your client base safe and satisfied.

Reseller hosting can be an effective way to enhance security for your clients, without having to invest a lot of extra resources in your own security practices.

As the hosting sector is very competitive, many of the best reseller hosting providers package high-end cybersecurity measures with their hosting services, including regular malware scanning, protection from brute-force attacks, and web application firewalls.

This enables you to pass enhanced protection and peace of mind on to your clients, without having to arrange the necessary security infrastructure yourself.

Great Scalability

When providing your own hosting solutions as part of a long-term contract, you could run the risk of a client’s site scaling too quickly, and “hitting a ceiling” when the needs of their website surpass your hosting capacity. When you’re partnered with a good reseller hosting provider, however, this is rarely an issue.

If you find a service with unlimited reseller hosting, the hosting infrastructure will be able to scale automatically alongside your client sites, ensuring you’re able to keep up with high traffic flows and maintain a responsive user experience.

With the great scalability offered by reseller hosting solutions, you’ll make it easy to keep your service offerings in line with the demands of even your most ambitious clients.

Effortless Technical Support

In the fast-paced world of web development, you’re bound to run into technical obstacles every now and then. 

When you partner with a reseller hosting program, you’ll be able to mitigate these issues through access to dedicated technical support and maintenance. This will help you and your clients through the challenges of managing infrastructure, servers, and software updates that would usually fall to you if you were providing hosting yourself.

When the technical aspects of your hosting service are handled by third-party expert providers, you’ll relieve yourself of many admin and compliance responsibilities through dedicated technical support, and free up time to invest in helping your clients towards their web development or marketing goals.

Pricing Strategies and Maximizing Profit Margins

To ensure reseller hosting is a profitable addition to your digital agency, it’s important to consider your pricing strategy.

Whether you’re introducing reseller hosting to new clients or upselling to existing ones, here are three effective pricing strategies to help you maximize your profit margins.

Tiered Plans

Create tiered reseller hosting packages that cater to a range of client budgets and requirements. For example:

• Basic package: A starter package with essential features like hosting, basic security and minimal storage.
• Standard package: A mid-tier option offering added benefits like SSL certificates or automated backups.
• Premium package: A comprehensive plan offering maximum storage, advanced performance features, and priority client support.

Offering flexible tiered packages can help your clients find a package that suits their budget and requirements while providing opportunities to upsell additional features and scale with them as their business grows.

Bundle Value-added Services

For agencies specializing in website development, bundling reseller hosting with existing, complementary services is a great way to expand your offering. For example, you could combine reseller hosting with: 

• Website performance monitoring.
• Search engine optimization (SEO).
• Website design and development. 

A bundled service pricing strategy provides added value to clients and establishes a unique selling point (USP) for your agency, compared to competitors that may offer these services in isolation at a higher price point. 

A bundled pricing strategy positions your agency as a one-stop solution, giving you a competitive edge and improving client acquisition.

Subscription-Based Pricing

Reseller hosting’s subscription-based model makes it a reliable source of recurring revenue. A strategic approach to subscription-based pricing can make all the difference: 

• Offer discounts for long-term contracts: Encourage clients to sign up for annual plans by offering discounts or additional features. Additional features such as free setup or additional storage. This helps increase client retention and creates predictable revenue for your agency.
• Flexible payment options: Offer clients monthly, quarterly, or annual billing cycles to fit their cash flow and financial needs. This flexibility can make your services more appealing to a range of businesses.

By defining a clear pricing strategy through added-value bundles, and tiered or subscription-based plans, you can use reseller hosting to strengthen client relationships and drive scalable, recurring revenue that helps improve your agency’s bottom line.

Upgrading Your Digital Agency With Reseller Hosting

Though reseller hosting isn’t for every agency, it can be a great way to provide your clients with faster, more secure, and more scalable websites, all while saving time and money as you build a powerful new revenue stream.

If you’re considering a reseller hosting partnership for your digital agency, we hope this guide has given you a clearer idea of what it entails, and helped you make a more informed decision as you expand your service offering.