You know how you sometimes have an idea that looks amazing on paper, but always falls short of your expectations when you try to implement it? The GoDaddy reseller program is one of those theoretically sound, yet practically unwise decisions.
White label hosting or reseller hosting is a subscription-based business model that makes it possible for you to become a provider of web hosting services without the physical infrastructure of a hosting provider.
In other words, the program allows you to lease out web space from a large hosting organization such as GoDaddy. The leased space is packaged with a large chunk of disk space and bandwidth – which you can split up and sublet to other end users. Think of it as renting a big mansion with several rooms and then renting out the rooms to different tenants.
Typically, you’ll resell web hosting only. However, if you’ve got that entrepreneurial itch, some hosting providers will offer you an additional suite of services and products that you can sell including domain registration, email servers, website builders, and more.
So, if you’re good at merchandising and customer service, white label hosting can be a decent way to increase the earnings of your current business or build a hosting company of your own from the ground up.
In this GoDaddy reseller review, I’ll take you through the ups and downs of the company’s service. But before we dive into the niceties, let’s have an overview of the GoDaddy reseller program. Read on.
An Overview of the GoDaddy Reseller Program
GoDaddy, a notable domain registrar, and a well-established hosting provider have been one of the leading companies that played a significant role in the rise in popularity of reseller hosting.
The Arizona based company offers one of the most popular reseller hosting programs in the market. The program comes with a plethora of features coupled with a variety of options to make reseller hosting easier.
While there are many good aspects to GoDaddy’s reseller program, their offer sometimes falls short in terms of benefits and, by extension, what you can offer your potential clients. When sales and basic support are your kernel operations, you want to make sure that your product is the best possible one you can afford.
If you want to learn more about the company itself, you can check out our review of GoDaddy. Now let’s see what the GoDaddy reseller program entails.
GoDaddy Reseller Plans and Price Value
The GoDaddy reseller hosting is quite versatile and offers some pretty attractive plans. There are three reseller accounts. Namely, the Basic Pro reseller program, Reseller hosting, and API for developers.
Many times, users mistake the Basic Pro reseller program for Reseller hosting. However, the two programs have different aspects and products to offer.
This review will focus on the Basic Pro reseller program. However, I felt it worthwhile to talk about the 3 reseller accounts to help avoid any mix-up.
Basic Pro Reseller
The Basic Pro reseller program offers two plans. The Basic reseller and the Pro reseller package. The two packages differ in terms of price, number of customers, and buy rates.
The Basic reseller plan retails at $8.99/month and is recommended for resellers who don’t intend to host more than 25 customers. Resellers who sign up for this plan enjoy a 20% discount off of the standard GoDaddy retail rates.
The Pro plan, on the other hand, goes for $14.99/month and is ideal for resellers who expect to host an unlimited number of customers. With the Pro plan, subscribers enjoy a 40% discount – which to me is well worth the difference except if you don’t anticipate a huge customer base.
With the Basic or Pro reseller program, you have a huge scope of products that you can sell including hosting, domains, SSL certificates, website builder, email, and more. You also get white-label GoDaddy support.
It’s also important to note that, both plans rely on shared hosting – which means you have no control over the number of customers sharing your server resources.
Reminder: Basic Pro reseller prices are quoted monthly but they are billed annually, biannually, tri-annually, etc.
GoDaddy Reseller Hosting
Reseller hosting on the other hand is more advanced than the Basic Pro reseller program. So, if you want more control of how you sell your services, how you bill your customers, or how you allocate server resources among other things, you should consider upgrading to reseller hosting.
With GoDaddy Reseller hosting you have the power of VPS hosting – which means you decide the density you want on your servers. This means better performance and better security for your clients.
In addition, GoDaddy reseller hosting gives you the option to choose the number of plans you want to sell – without restrictions. Reseller hosting offers four plans.
Namely, Enhance ($39.99/mo), Grow ($49.99/mo), Expand ($64.99/mo), and Established ($89.99/mo). The plans vary in terms of RAM, CPU, and Storage.
Here’s a quick breakdown.
- Enhance (cheapest reseller hosting plan) you get 2 CPUs, 4 GB RAM, and 90 GB storage.
- Grow you get 3 CPUs, 6 GB RAM, and 120 GB of storage.
- Expand offers 4 CPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and 150 GB of storage memory.
- Established (most expensive plan on the list) offers 4 CPUs, 16 GB RAM, and storage memory of 240 GB.
All reseller hosting plans include a free cPanel/ WHM/ WHMCS, 250 white-labeled accounts, unmetered bandwidth, free SSL certificate, 24/7 support, and reseller-enabled go-daddy domains.
Unlike the Basic Pro reseller program, Reseller hosting only allows you to resell hosting, domains, and other third party products via the WHMCS market place. You also have to offer support to your clients and process payment directly via your own payment server.
API Reseller
API is another reseller account designed for developers who want to resell GoDaddy domains via their own infrastructure and are comfortable with API integration. With API, you need to have your own storefront, offer support to your customers, and process payments.
Product Offerings
The GoDaddy reseller program is a little more go-getting. This is especially so for individuals who are looking to get into the reseller hosting business but are not technically savvy when it comes to web design and development.
For one, the services are completely turnkey – which means they are ready-to-go, full-package solutions. As such, you can set up your web hosting business in a jiffy.
On sign up, you get a customizable pre-built- storefront, ready-to-go shopping cart, credit card processing to handle orders, site analytics, sales and commission activity tracking, along with other tools to assist you to hit the ground up and running.
Once you are all set up, there is so much that you can offer your customers other than hosting. Some major GoDaddy products that you can resell include domain names, SSL certificates, email, servers, website builder, and Managed WordPress Hosting.
Control Over Pricing
As a reseller, your return on investment is very important. And this is one area (in my opinion) that GoDaddy does so well. While some reseller hosting providers just offer you commissions, GoDaddy gives you complete control overpricing.
There are no fixed margins or commission rates – which means you are at liberty to resell GoDaddy products at your own set prices. The approach helps you determine how much profit you’ll take home at the end of the month.
Sometimes you may be a little confused about how to apply pricing on all of the products on your storefront and also whether to choose the Basic or the Pro reseller program. GoDaddy makes this process simple for resellers.
To set the pricing structure to all products you can use the Global Pricing option on the Reseller Control Center. Also, you can use the Reseller Profit Estimator to estimate how much profit you could make either as a Pro reseller or a Basic reseller.
Control Panel
The cPanel is an industry-standard web-based control panel that helps you manage your web hosting via a simple, non-technical interface.
Each GoDaddy Basic/Pro reseller hosting account includes an easy to use white-labeled cPanel (control center) that allows you to create individual cPanel accounts for each client, monitor server resources, as well as view tracking and reports.
You can also use the interface to customize your storefront with your own branding and set up your reseller products catalog. Branding your packages helps establish credibility, recognition, and great customer loyalty.
Reliability and Uptime
With reseller hosting, you cannot afford to compromise on speed and reliability. In fact, you’ll quickly learn that most of your time will be spent on managing servers than clients.
For that reason, you’ll find that the least time consuming and easiest way is to make sure that you lease server space from a reputable host provider. Certainly, GoDaddy is one – and it truly excels in some areas despite the internet being awash with negative reviews.
GoDaddy guarantees a 99.99% uptime on all its plans. Well, according to our tests, GoDaddy lives true to its promise. Our uptime tests, which ran for a period of three months showed that GoDaddy actually hit an uptime rating of 100%. Quite commendable, right?
I know 3 months is a short period to make an overall judgment, but the fact that GoDaddy offers an uptime guarantee is a reason to trust them. Also, the uptime guarantee includes a 5% credit on your hosting fee if the uptime falls below 99.9%.
However, I think they have some kinks to iron out with the compensation terms. For example, in the event you experience downtime, the refund must be used to purchase GoDaddy products. This is not indicated in the terms that underpin the guarantee.
More still, you only have 48 hours to claim a refund if you are on a monthly subscription and 30 days for annual subscriptions if you are unsatisfied with the service or if a hosting service has not been set up. To be fair, this is not a money-back guarantee.
Customer Support
Things are bound to go wrong at some point and when this happens, you’ve got to make sure that your clients get the necessary service – and fast. Fortunately, the GoDaddy reseller program comes with around-the-clock white-labeled customer support. This includes support for resellers and their sub-accounts.
So, if you are not technically savvy, the dedicated team at GoDaddy can offer support on your behalf. With the white-labeled support it means that when your clients’ emails, calls, or initiates a live chat with the support, they won’t know that it’s GoDaddy providing the support.
This customer support model is ideal for resellers with little technical knowledge or who have little time to respond to their client’s queries. What I found disappointing, however, with GoDaddy’s customer support is the long wait time on their live support channel. I first noticed this when we compared GoDaddy to Bluehost. You can spend close to an hour waiting to get connected to a live rep.
Also, the rep I got hold of wasn’t knowledgeable of the subject I had queries about and I had to be transferred to another rep, which took about 20 minutes. Well, I wasn’t satisfied with the responses I got but what I like about the reps is their politeness.
GoDaddy Reseller Program or GoDaddy Reseller Hosting?
We’ll, the decision lies entirely with you. Besides, there are many benefits that you stand to gain as opposed to loosing. With that said, here is a summary of the benefits of the GoDaddy Reseller program as well as those of reseller hosting.
Benefits of Reseller Basic/Pro:
- Offer your customers a full suite of digital services through a white-labeled online storefront that offers competitive wholesale pricing and allows you to set your own retail pricing.
- Ensure that your reseller storefront fits the look and feel of your brand by taking advantage of their new WordPress plugin, which allows your customers to search for domains and add products to your reseller storefront’s shopping cart.
- Through GoDaddy’s delegation functionality, you can easily access your customers’ GoDaddy account and manage their white-labeled GoDaddy products on their behalf.
- GoDaddy processes your customers’ payments and sends you your commission, so you don’t have to set up any kind of payment gateway.
So, as you can see from the short summary, both the basic and pro plans are aimed at newcomers who are just getting into reselling hosting. They come with more accessible prices and allow you to set up your own shop in a matter of minutes. But on the downside, you are limited when it comes to customization and scaling.
Benefits of GoDaddy Reseller hosting
- Server up to 250 clients with the ability to modify, edit and suspend customer accounts at any time through the control panel.
- On your branded storefront, display your offering to your clients.
- Accept payment in multiple currencies from different payment processors across the word. Also, you don’t have to receive automated invoices when getting paid.
- With fully configurable resources, you have the power to create customized packages and define your pricing.
- With dedicated CPU and RAM, you enjoy the power of VPS hosting.
- Define the billing process that suits well with your type of business. For example, auto-renewals, one-time payments, subscriptions, etc.
Now, when it comes to the reseller hosting program, things are a bit different. Just as we saw throughout the GoDaddy reseller review, this is aimed at customers that already have at least a website prepared. It provides more resources, it comes with higher limits and it allows complete customization. That means you can operate under your own brand without ever having to talk about the partnership.
With that being said, there’s shouldn’t be any doubt when it comes to which plan to pick. As for my overall opinion of GoDaddy’s program, I would say it is worthwhile, especially if you plan on promoting multiple type of products.
https://www.mamboserver.com/web-hosting/reviews/godaddy-reseller-review/
