Many resellers are not maximizing their revenue

Many of our resellers are web designers who host their design clients under their reseller account. This tends to work great for both the client and the designer. The client doesn’t need to spend time finding a reliable hosting company to use and the designer gets to access all of the clients files to be able to better serve the client. While this works out well for both parties, is the reseller getting the most out of those design clients? I know that many of our resellers do not.

What seems to happen most often is that the designer packages the domain registration and hosting services into the cost of the web design for the client. When the designer does this they are actually loosing revenue from the client that could potentially add up to thousands of dollars. In today’s economic times, I personally don’t know of any reseller that can afford to throw away that kind of revenue stream.

Now I can understand the idea of wanting to package these products and services for the design client. When you trying to sell the client on a new web design for a few thousand dollars the last thing you want to do is nickel and dime them on the domain registration and hosting fee’s as well. That’s a perfectly acceptable way of thinking but the freebies can’t last forever. The smart thing to do would be to write it into the design contract that you are providing these services for free for one year and then they will be a specified amount per month/year for each service.

The fact is that the designer has to pay monthly for thier reseller account they get from their hosting company, why shouldn’t they be charging those design clients and making up that cost. Most designers with reseller accounts would not only make enough to pay for their reseller account but also put some extra revenue in thier own pockets at the same time.

A perfect example of this is one of our own resellers who is in fact a web designer. This particular reseller hosts every design client his company has with his reseller account. I went and did a quick look at his account and noticed he has 96 linux clients and 23 windows clients. If he was to charge a simple $10 per linux account and $12 per windows account his monthly recurring revenue stream would be $1236.00/month. This easily covers his reseller account fee’s and puts some extra change in his pocket every month. This does not even include what he could charge for the domain registrations, hosting addons, ssl certificates and so on.

Now the question really becomes, why would any reseller/designer not be charging for these services? The only reason I can think of is that they either have way too much money and don’t need the revenue or they have bundled these services as part of a website maintenance plan that they do charge the client. I know this isn’t always the case for our resellers.

So are you charging your design clients monthly for thier hosting fees? Are you planning on starting now? The reality is that 2 hosting clients paying $10/month covers the cost of our value reseller plan.