Quick note: This article presumes a couple of specific dates which affect the US more so than they do the rest of the world. For instance, I mention our tax season which is in April and we have some end of the year holidays like Thanksgiving that others may celebrate on different dates or not at all. If you are outside of the US you should use this as a guideline for how the ebbs and flow should work in your local region.

Most of the companies I have marketed for eventually reached a plateau until they developed some new product or service line or had a stronger message to the marketplace. When you hit that plateau you might see a couple slow days or strong days here or there but your percentage won’t vary too much more than 15% from your plateau, but that plateau is going to change with the seasons.

From the second full business day in January of each new year until the end of March you should experience higher sales and a higher plateau. April slows for the first half of the month then picks back up in the second part of the month and sales are stronger, although not like January – March, until the end of May. June through August are typically slower months with August being either the worst or second worse month for sales for the year. September through most of November sales are good, with October bringing the strongest sales of these three months. Finally the end of November until the second new business day of the next year sales will be slow and December could be your worst or second worse month of the year.

Here’s why:

January, school is back in session. For the parents with a small or midsize business idea they had been working on or were expanding upon just got a new year’s resolution to get their motivation back. They think expansion and for many that means a new or upgraded website. Sales jump during this period and I would tell any new web hosting business that they had better be ready to go during this time as new sales acquisition should be up until the end of March.

March is also one of the strongest months of the year so I would encourage anyone who is starting a hosting company to keep their eye on the ball all the way through here and to not become complacent just because January and February were banner months, March could be the best yet.

April hits and two things happen during this time; spring break and tax season. Luckily this only negatively affects sales for the first half of the month. By the second half of the month, school is back in session and all those last minute tax filers have taken care of their obligation to the government and they are back to being focused on their business. May should be a good steady month in terms of sales.

June arrives and summer hits… hard. Slowdown during this time is very noticeable. Kids are out of school, families are traveling or they have a different schedule or routine that throws them off of their business like focus they had during most of the first 5 months of the year. This is going to last through august and most often August is the worst month as most families have planned their last big summer trip or holidays together and the focus is just not on buying website hosting.

September… finally!!! Kids are back in school and parents and professionals are no longer in Summer vacation mode, they’re ready to get back to work, at least until the end of November. Sales go back up and October is typically the strongest month here.

A quick note during the period from September through the end of the year. Your weekends will be slow and possibly slower than they are even during the summer months. This is because you are dealing with trying to divert people’s attention away from NCAA and NFL football and I have never in all my years been able to compete with this phenomena. You will also see a slight slowdown during MLB Playoffs in October and the start of the NBA and NHL for the slight slowdown in early November. But NFL Sunday Football will crush sales on weekends.

At the end of November people are traveling extensively to see each other for Thanksgiving and then in December you have holiday parties and end of the year parties that they are either getting ready to host or attend. Kids are now also out of school which is another distraction for adults. Also during this time the days are getting shorter which makes people not quite as motivated as they normally are and all of this will drag down your sales at the end of the year.

This is the time to prepare for Q1 of the following year so that you can maximize sales acquisition during that robust period I mentioned earlier.

A personal experience of mine:

It was the end of 2002 when I experienced my first great tidal change in terms of new sales growth. Sales were way off in December of that year, close to 30% from our plateau earlier that fall. I couldn’t understand it, I had been kicking butt with our marketing, we had not lost any market positions. I checked and rechecked our marketing positions and I could not explain to the executives I worked for what was wrong or why sales were so bad. We came into the office on January 2nd and sales were not only bad that day but they had been worse the 2 previous days for the New Year’s holiday.

Everyone was worried, there was tons of hand wringing and vows to work that much harder because for us the sky was falling. The next day was a Friday and things looked up a bit and then the weekend was strong. The following week was the biggest week we had ever had and the week after that was even bigger. Sales were up over 40% from the plateau we had back during the fall. Hand wringing turned to back slapping as the trend continued for many weeks before finally tapering off a bit and then slowing down in the summer.

So it is important to know the seasons and how they are going to affect your growth and your marketing budgets. It is also important to know that a slump may not mean that you are doing something wrong. It is equally important to know that an increase may not be sustained throughout the year and that you need to keep working hard to ensure that you can continue to grow your web hosting business.

I hope that this helps anyone looking to start their own web hosting business. Good luck to you and I wish you success.

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It’s recommended that when you are selling web hosting, like domains you sell SSL certificates. This is a value added service and makes it easier on the customer to purchase everything they need in one spot.

When it comes to selecting the right SSL reseller provider, just stick with eNom as you do with your domains. They offer small website certificates from $9.95 and range all the way up to 500 per year for premium SSL certificates. This is your cost, you can then mark it up and sell to your customer.

Generally, you want to charge around $30-40 per certificate. This is the standard price for SSL certificates. Don’t be afraid to charge those who are making money with their websites a little money to run their websites.

If you’re a GreenGeeks customer, you get a free eNom reseller account that will get you access to sell SSL certificates. Here’s how you can obtain the eNom reseller account. Alternatively, you can search for “enom reseller account” on Google.

Remember that you also set up an SSL certificate for your site as well. This will bring confidence to online buyers. Without an SSL certificate (that lock in the browser), customers may be turned away thinking their information can be easily hacked into.

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Merchant Account

This is where you have an account directly with the merchant banks and charges appear in your name on the customers credit card bill.

Merchant accounts provide you with flexibility which you don’t really get with 3rd party processors. There are a lot of merchant account providers that will provide you with a merchant account for businesses based in the United States. For the most part you must have a US business presence, however this is not always the case. It’s best to check with the merchant account provider.

Here are some merchant account providers:

• PayPal Pro Services
• E-OnlineData.com (recommended)
• FirstData.com

3rd Party Payment Processor

This is where another company processes the payment for you and then sends you the funds on a set time period. The customer sees a different name on the credit card statement.

For beginners, this is almost always the best way to go as anyone can get going through the use of PayPal to start accepting payments. PayPal is easy because a lot of client management and billing systems integrate into PayPal out of the box, this makes getting going very easy.

When funds are collected with PayPal, they sit in the PayPal account, almost like a bank account. You can then withdraw at anytime to your bank account. Be sure to check to ensure that you’re able to withdraw from them to your local bank.

Here are some other 3rd party providers:

• 2CheckOut.com
• WorldPay.com

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• Take orders and process them with ease
• Automatically invoice and charge your customers
• Automatically integrate to register, transfer and renew domain names for your customers
• Automatically manage their web hosting subscription by creating, suspending, un-suspending and terminating web hosting accounts on your servers
• Enable you to have customer support through a help desk and knowledge base
• Manage a whole slew of other items that make your life easier.

There are a lot of web hosting client management systems available on the Internet for your use, some are free and some are not. Here are a few that are popular:

• ClientExec
• AWBS
• HostBill
• WHMCS

It’s highly recommend that you use WHMCS because they have proven to be a very reliable company and are always advancing. Recently, cPanel has also purchased stake in the company which further solidifies the company. In this training course, we will be using WHMCS as the system of choice.

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There are a dozens of domain reseller providers but the most popular and most complete is eNom, which will allow you to register all the major TLD’s. When you purchase reseller hosting service with GreenGeeks, you get a free enom domain reseller account, this saves you $1600 in set up fees with eNom.

API vs Turn-Key Resellers

There are two main types of domain reseller accounts in the industry, turn-key and then there is the API version.

The Turn-Key Reseller Account provides you with a custom “clone” of the domain registrar’s full working website and from here you’ll be able to sell domain names. This method is fairly simple in that you simply send customers to this portal and they will be able to buy domains. The customer will pay the registrar directly and not you and then you’ll be able to collect the accumulated funds from the registrar.

This solution is great for those who do not intend to start a true web hosting business. The solution that is recommended for operating a real web hosting business is the API version.

The API version which is offered by most reseller services that offer Turn-Key Reseller accounts allows you to seamlessly integrate into your order flow/billing system. This means a bit more work upfront but in the end it will allow you to experience seamless growth and a positive experience for the customer.

As mentioned earlier, eNom is the preferred domain reseller provider. They offer both the turn-key account, which is called Instant Reseller. While this may be the quickest way to start selling domains, it also leaves you without any behind the scenes work and that means you’re left without the experience.

It’s recommended that you use eNom’s API which will allow you to seamlessly sell domains to customers. The great part is, if you’re using popular client management systems like WHMCS or ClientExec, you just have to insert a username and password to enable the API (all the actual coding work is already done).

Now with eNom you have to be an Enom Technology Partner and can cost you up to $1600 plus deposits to be used towards domain registrations and to get their wholesale pricing. The good news is that there are a lot of web hosting providers who can set up sub-resellers where you can save the initial cost of becoming an Enom Technology Partner. For example, with GreenGeeks, you’re able to enom reseller account saving the initial setup cost.

You can also search for it on Google by typing in “enom reseller account”.

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You may be asking what about VPS and dedicated servers? Well, there is no point in overspending on resources unless you’ve got many clients. It’s easy to upgrade down the road with the right hosting provider. There’s also a learning curve involved with those technologies, so it is best to start with a reseller hosting account and work your way up.

There are several reseller hosting options on the market, but the most popular one is WHM/cPanel.

The WHM/cPanel Reseller Hosting Account

The industry’s most popular reseller account is powered WHM/cPanel. There’s only a couple of draw backs 1) It does not support Windows hosting, not yet anyway and 2) customers could easily backup and move to another cPanel-powered host — but that will make it easy for you to take customers as well. Besides that, WHM/cPanel will be your best friend in this industry. The control panel cPanel is the most commonly used web hosting control panel on the planet and that means that if there is ever a problem, you can simply search it on Google and find a fix.

In addition to that, because WHM/cPanel is so widely used, there are tons of 3rd party applications that integrate and make life easier on the web host and on the end-user, increasing customer satisfaction.

A lot of people who set out to start their web hosting business look at price as the only determining factor when choosing a reseller hosting provider to depend on. It’s highly recommended that you avoid doing that and focus on quality and reputation of the hosts you’re looking at. You and your business need to depend on the hosting provider, cheaping out is going to only cause you problems in the future.

When setting out to select a dependable reseller host, make sure you do your research. Be sure to check out GreenGeeks, as we offer exceptional quality, affordability and reputation for web hosting businesses to depend on including easy upgrades, support and more.

The Turn-key Reseller Account

It’s strongly suggested that you stay away from turn-key solutions that are provided by GoDaddy or Enom. They create ready-made sites that all you to sell everything under the sun. While this may sound great, it’s not. These types of solutions make it impossible to actually grow your business to anything respectable and on top of that you wouldn’t learn a thing except for how to make a sale by sending traffic to sites that look and work exactly like your competitors — except the logo is different.

You lose the freedom of being independent. You’re limited to what they offer and don’t offer. Your pricing is determined by their wholesale price along with a whole bunch of other limitations.

In the end, the decision is yours. If you’re serious about your web hosting business, stay away from turn key solutions.

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Here are a few pointers to go by when choosing a name for your web hosting business:

• Pick a domain that has been around for some time.
  It’s smart to invest in a good domain name that has at least been registered for a couple of years. While customers are looking into your brand, they won’t see that it’s just been registered.  Customers will want to know how long you have been in business, and they won’t ask you directly but rather check on the WHOIS data. So it’s better to get a domain name that has been around for a while.You can find already registered domain names at sites such as BuyDomains.com, Sedo.com, GreatDomains.com.It’s not the end of the world if you’re unable to find an already established domain. There’s nothing wrong with starting out with a fresh domain name. Selecting an existing name only helps you in case your potential customers are wondering how long you have been in business.
• An easy to remember domain nameThis one is quite simple, pick a name that is easy to pronounce, spell and remember. Word of mouth is a huge part of the business and if you have a extremely long domain name or a domain that sounds alike, then you’re losing business. I’m sure you’ve heard of “KISS” before — Keep It Simple Stupid.

• SEO Friendly Name
  Try to include a keyword in the domain name that you’re targeting, say for example you’re selling web hosting to Lawyers, you could have a domain like www.laywerwebhost.com or www.lawyerhosting.com. This in some cases will give you a better chance of getting listed prominently for your niche keyword. However, it doesn’t mean anything if you do not have any one linking to you… so while it’s good to have it’s not extremely important.

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Getting Started

1. Selecting a Name for Your Web Hosting Business
2. Selecting the Right Platform for your Web Hosting Business
3. Selecting a Domain Reseller Provider
4. Web Hosting Client Management & Billing System
5. Selecting the Right Payment Gateway
6. Selecting an SSL Reseller Provider

Executive Insights

1. How Seasons Affect New Customer Acquisition’s

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