Reseller hosting can be an excellent source of passive income. Customers need hosting every month or year their website stays online, which gives you the opportunity to create recurring income rather than relying completely on one-off work. It’s not totally passive, though. You’re still selling a service, and clients might occasionally need your help. Still, it pretty much is hands-off passive. Below, our guide teaches you how to do it.
What’s Reseller Hosting, and How Does It Work?
Taking advantage of one of the best reseller hosting providers, lets you make money on the hosting resources you’ve already paid for by dividing them into smaller packages for other people to purchase. Rather than running physical servers yourself, you’re using infrastructure provided by a hosting company and managing the individual customer accounts sitting on top of it.
You might have enough capacity for 30 websites, for example, and create separate packages based on what each customer needs. For example, whether a website needs more bandwidth.
You then decide:
- What each package includes
- How much each customer pays
- Whether you bill monthly or annually
- How much support you’re willing to provide
The difference between what the reseller plan costs you and what your customers pay is where the income comes from.
The Best Way to Make Money From Reseller Hosting
Making money from reseller hosting is less about signing up as many people as possible and more about getting the pricing right.
If your hosting costs $80 per month and you’re only making $90 from customers, you’ve technically got recurring revenue, but you’re not making much money from it. Start by working out what every account actually costs you.
Then you can create packages with enough margin built in to cover things like:
- Hosting costs
- Payment processing fees
- Billing software
- Support time
- Refunds
- Extra licences or services
You can also charge differently depending on how involved you want to be.
Automation also makes a massive difference if you want the income to stay relatively hands-off. Recurring payments, automatic invoices, account provisioning, and renewal reminders can all reduce the amount of admin you have to do yourself.
How Much Money Can You Make From Reseller Hosting?
There’s no fixed amount because it depends entirely on your costs, customer numbers, and pricing.
Say your average customer pays $15 per month. With 10 customers, that’s $150 in monthly revenue. With 30 customers, it’s $450. With 100 customers, it’s $1,500. But that still isn’t your profit. If your hosting, billing tools, payment fees, and other costs total $200 per month, you’d need to subtract that before working out what you’re actually making.
You also need to think about how much time the customers take up. A smaller group paying slightly more each month can sometimes make more sense than loads of very cheap accounts that constantly need help.
That’s why reseller hosting works best when the setup is simple, pricing leaves enough margin, and most of the billing and account management runs automatically.
It might not be completely passive, but once everything is running, you can keep earning from the same customer accounts without needing to sell a new project every month.
