One of the best ways to grow your web hosting business is to add additional revenue streams. Adding additional revenue streams provides more value to your clients and is a great way to grow your business. There are lots of related revenue streams to choose from, making it easy to start with a few and add more as you grow. Revenue streams include recurring revenue, one-time revenue, and even passive income. In this post, we’ll look at the best additional revenue streams for hosting resellers to help you decide the best for your needs.
Why Additional Revenue Streams
Reselling website hosting is one of the best revenue streams on the web. So, why would anyone need more revenue streams if they’re already reselling hosting?
Firstly, it’s a great way to grow your business. The more services you can provide, the greater your opportunities to make sales and increase your revenue.
Secondly, many clients prefer web hosting companies that offer related services. So, the more value you can provide by adding additional revenue streams helps draw customers to you. You’ll become a one-stop shop where customers can get everything they need to run a successful website. Your hosting business would include value-added services, which increase the value of your business to your customers.
Thirdly, hosting resellers, or any sales for that matter, will never have control over their customer’s situations, plans, or circumstances. Websites close for various reasons. People change their minds about running a website, or maybe they don’t make the income they expected, no longer have the time to run their websites, don’t get the traffic they wanted, or reduce their plan to a smaller hosting plan. These are just a few of the many possible reasons that someone would close a website. They could cause someone to drop their website hosting plan. These types of issues can cause variations in revenue. To even out the revenue, it’s best to create multiple revenue streams. When one revenue stream is slow, another revenue stream can take up the slack.
How Many Revenue Streams Do You Need?
In general, the more revenue streams you can manage, the better. The key here is “manage”. I don’t recommend adding so many that you can’t manage them well. It’s better to offer a few services you can perform well than a lot of services that you can handle. Having more than you can handle will likely result in streams that don’t get enough attention to be successful. Many recommend running seven revenue streams.
Some recommend revenue streams in unrelated fields while others recommend staying in your current field. I recommend building additional revenue streams around website hosting. There are enough revenue possibilities around website hosting and each revenue stream will help build the others. A client for one revenue stream can potentially become a client for all of your revenue streams.
Additional Revenue Streams for Hosting Resellers
Many reseller hosting plans, such as those from Verpex Hosting, offer extras such as free SSL for every domain and subdomain, domain regeneration and transfer, and malware protection. However, there are additional services you could offer as a hosting reseller to bring in more income.
Keep in mind, you don’t have to do the work yourself. You can hire experts to do the work for you or to fill in when you don’t have time to do the work yourself. I recommend creating a landing page that provides the details of your extra services. These keywords will bring traffic to your hosting reseller business.
Now, let’s see our recommended additional revenue streams for hosting resellers. I’ll also post links to articles for more information.
Premium Support
It’s a good idea to offer support for your clients, but you can also provide more extensive premium support for those willing to pay extra. You could provide a scaled package with the basic support included with their hosting plan and various levels of premium support add-ons. Clients could choose the level of support that fits their budget and needs.
Maintenance
Additional maintenance plans could include performing updates and backups. You could also monitor security, remove malware, delete spam comments, etc. You could provide several levels of maintenance with various pricing options so clients can choose the maintenance plan that works for them.
For more information, see the article Website Maintenance Checklist: 21 Crucial Tasks You Shouldn't Skip.
Website Migration
Many website owners already have a website, and they want to migrate it to your hosting plan. You could offer migration as a service.
Custom Integration
Custom integration services could include integrating packages with APIs. This could include systems that aren’t normally available within WordPress or require lots of extra work to set up.
Plugin Installation
There are lots of WordPress plugins that require detailed setup. This includes WooCommerce, LMS platforms, bbPress, BuddyPress, security, backups, cache, events, appointment calendars, and lots more.
Many of these plugins require lots of time and know-how to set them up correctly. Even if users set them up themselves, they might not know how to optimize them. Users might prefer to hire a professional to perform the installation and setup for them. You can set them up for success so they can focus on what they do best instead of focusing on work with which they’re not familiar.
Sell Child Themes and Layouts
Premade child themes and layouts provide elegant designs that help customers get a head start on their website designs. Creating child themes and layouts to sell to your customers can be a lucrative revenue stream. This works well as passive income. Child themes often provide new features, making them ideal for specific types of websites. Layouts are simpler and easier to use. You could create custom child themes or layouts based on your client’s needs, and you could create designs to sell from your online shop.
For more information, see the articles What is a Child Theme in WordPress and Visual Hierarchy in Web Design: A Guide to Creating Effective Layouts.
Child Theme Installation and Customization
Child themes are a great way to change the look and features of a website. Many child themes include demo content that can be imported with a single click. However, this is only the beginning of the process. Website owners also need to replace the dummy content and images with their own. Most prefer to change the colors to match their branding.
You could also install and customize them as an additional service. Providing child theme installation and customization allows your clients to get the features, images, text, and colors they want without needing advanced knowledge of the child theme.
Website Design
Users often don’t have design skills. They typically choose a WordPress theme and a few plugins they need and call it a day. If they wanted something that changed the look of their website, they would choose another WordPress theme.
You could provide web design services to help them stand out from the crowd and build their unique brand. Web design services become even more needed when users want to build an online catalog, store, or a larger website.
Website Customization
WordPress themes and plugins provide lots of features, but there are times when website owners need something developed or customized for their needs. You could provide customization services that span from simple setups and adjustments of plugins and themes, to creating new features with code.
Website Optimization
Once the user has their website running, they need their websites to load fast and run smoothly. They also need to be found in search engines. You could provide optimization options to improve images and SEO. Optimizations could also include usability such as color choices, font sizes, button placement, reduce bounce rate and lots more. You could even optimize their sales funnel to help improve their conversions.
For more information about SEO, see the articles 22 SEO Tips for WordPress and SEO for Web Developers.
Graphic Design
Many website owners prefer to create the websites themselves. However, there are areas where they would purchase something to help them create the website. For example, they might need icons, logos, buttons, graphical elements, background graphics, illustrations, infographics, images for social media, featured images, etc. Many of these work great as ongoing services, allowing you to create monthly plans. You could also create graphics to see from your shop.
For more information, see the articles Typography in Graphic Design and 14 Best Free Graphic Design Software Programs for 2023.
Marketing Templates and Services
Marketing is an area where clients are likely to not have the skills, patience, or desire to handle themselves. There are several ways you could help with marketing. You could offer services for each type individually or offer a package that would cover all of the marketing options. This works well as a subscription service.
Firstly, you could provide templates for emails and social media posts for those interested in performing their own marketing tasks. You could sell the templates as a package or individually.
Secondly, you could provide marketing services to those not interested or skilled in promoting their website, content, or services. This includes social media posts, email newsletters, and more. You could create the content based on the website’s goals, branding, etc., create a publishing schedule, monitor the social media channels, and interact with the audience.
For more information, see the articles Social Media Marketing in the 2020s and 8 ECommerce Email Marketing Examples That Convert.
Copywriting and Content Creation
Many website owners are not skilled or interested in writing content. You could offer copywriting services such as the web copy on their pages as well as posts for their blog. This can include ongoing content creation based on keyword research that matches the website’s goals and strategy. The content strategy should include a schedule, such as a specific number of posts per week. This also works well as a subscription service and can be combined with marketing services.
This is an especially good service if you have a team of writers. Hiring a content creator is the best option for this since it takes a lot of time and requires writing skills. The content could be created in-house, or you could hire freelancers.
For more information, see the article 7 Website Content Ideas to Grow Your Business Today.
Create an Affiliate Blog
An affiliate blog is a great way to bring traffic to your website and promote affiliate products. This works well for linking to services you don’t provide and can be used as a sales funnel to lead readers to your hosting plans.
For more information, see the articles Affiliate Marketing With WordPress: Your Guide To Getting Started and How to Promote Affiliate Links (21 Ways to Try Today).
Sell Domain Names
There are several ways to sell domain names to your customers. You can sell domain names that you own, but this requires you to own a lot of high-quality domain names. A better option might be to integrate domain name services as an affiliate. You could provide links to domain names for sale and get a portion of every sale made through your links.
For more information about domain names, see the articles Most Expensive Domain Names Sold In 2021 And Ever and Most Expensive Domain Names Sold in 2022.
Offer Training Courses
Training is always a good option for additional revenue streams. You could provide one-on-one and team training with hourly rates, covering everything your clients need to know about starting and running their websites. You could also create video training courses that anyone can join. This would create passive income and the training courses could work as a lead magnet to your hosting services.
For more information, see the article Top 10 Online Courses for WordPress to Build a Website.
Ending Thoughts on Additional Revenue Streams for Hosting Resellers
That’s our look at additional revenue streams for hosting resellers. There are many options to add additional revenue streams that work well with reselling website hosting plans. Most require hands-on work, so they’re not considered passive income. They require a higher level of experience than many website owners have or want to invest their time in learning.
Many of these options can be handled by team members, freelancers, or VAs. Most of these options can be included in a package plan with one-time payments or subscription services. Regardless of your skill level, there’s something on this list for a hosting reseller wanting to add additional revenue streams to the hosting business.
We want to hear from you. Have you used any of these additional revenue streams for hosting resellers? Let us know about your experience in the comments.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is reseller hosting profitable?
In general, reseller hosting is very profitable. However, to be able to offset your initial cost, the hardest part will be getting your first few reseller clients.
What’s included in a reseller package?
Reseller packages commonly include disk space, domain hosting, bandwidth, the latest cPanel control panel, premium support by the hosting providers, the ability to brand your own web hosting company, and so on.
Are all reseller hosting plans cloud-based?
Our servers are in the cloud. So yes, all our reseller hosting plans are cloud-based
Do I need technical knowledge to use reseller hosting?
While it is helpful to have some technical knowledge when using reseller hosting, many hosting providers offer support and resources to help resellers manage their clients' hosting accounts.
Randy A. Brown is a freelance writer from east TN specializing in WordPress and eCommerce. He's a longtime WordPress enthusiast and loves learning new things and sharing information with others. If he's not writing or reading, he's probably playing guitar.
View all posts by Randy A. Brown