Reseller Hosting vs. Hosting Affiliate – Which One is Better

Thousands of new domain names are registered every day. Hosting plans are more powerful than ever, while modern website builders allow even novices to create professional websites. The online world keeps growing every year. Naturally, this growth opens a lot of opportunities to earn good money. After all, each new website must be hosted somewhere.

As we offer web hosting services, we will compare two of the ways to make money online – reseller hosting and hosting affiliate. If you are not very familiar with the matter, we will look at what each program is about, and what its advantages are. We offer both programs and, as you will notice, they may actually be better than many of the offers you can find on the market.

Reseller hosting vs. Hosting affiliate

You may be surprised, but many of the thousands of hosting companies out there are actually resellers. In simple terms, a reseller is a person or a company that pays to another company for a reseller account (a shared account or a standalone server) – hosting space with certain additional features where they can host the websites of their customers. The rented space can be divided into smaller accounts, and the reseller can charge their customers any amount they decide. Often, you can resell other services as well, such as domain names, SSL certificates and various upgrades. You will appear as the hosting provider for your customers.

It sounds great so far, but we have to mention a few disadvantages here. First and foremost, you pay for a reseller package (and often for billing software) even if you have no customers. Also, you can have only as many customers as your reseller package allows in terms of system resources. Last, but not least, all support requests will go to you. If you cannot resolve an issue, you can contact your hosting provider for assistance, but many providers refuse to assist unless a direct customer contacts them. As you will see below, these disadvantages do not apply to our reseller program.

In comparison, if you join an affiliate program, you will promote the services of the hosting provider directly, using a personalized affiliate link. Customers will not know about you, as they will see the provider’s name, and not your brand name. Usually, you will have an account with the provider where you can keep track of the sales (the number of customers who have signed up using your link). Affiliate programs are often used to increase the client base of a company. They can be used to promote either a single service, or the entire portfolio of a company.

The ICDSoft reseller program

Our hosting reseller program is a bit different from the programs of most of the other web hosting providers. You can still resell shared hosting plans, virtual servers, domain names and SSL certificates, but you do not have to pay for them in advance. When a client orders from your reseller store, you can order the service through your account with us. As you will see below, this is a great advantage compared to many other programs on the market. Our outstanding support team will provide 24/7 support to your customers without mentioning our name at any time. In the list of advantages below, we have listed things that are specific to our reseller program, and not to the reseller hosting in general.

Pros

• Easy to start. It will take only a few minutes from the moment you sign up for a free reseller account until the moment your new store is ready to accept orders. Our system will even create a website for you, which you can customize. All it takes to create a new reseller store is to choose a brand name and add a contact email address.

• No investment needed. Our reseller program is completely free to join and use. You do not have to pay for any service upfront, so if you have no customers when you start, you have no expenses. Once you start selling, customers will be paying a higher retail price to you for a given service, and you will pay a lower wholesale price to us, so you can never be at a loss.

• Long-term opportunity. Loyal customers may stay with you for years, and this is longer than the payment period for almost any affiliate program that is not a scam. A good reseller program has long-term earning potential, provided that you will keep your reseller account for that long.

• Opportunity to expand your business. If you offer web design services, signing up for a reseller account will allow you to offer a full set of services – web design, hosting and site maintenance. This way, you can easily expand your business and reach people who simply want to pay to one company for their web presence instead of dealing with multiple companies.

• No need to support customers. This is a big deal breaker for many people who want to try to resell hosting services, but do not have the experience or the skills to assist their customers. With our free reseller program, our outstanding support team will assist your customers with any questions they may have about the service. You can focus on expanding your client base and your business, and we will provide 24/7 support without mentioning our name.

• Promote your own brand. No matter if you have an established business, or you are just starting, you can promote your brand by offering quality services. Why should you put effort into promoting another company, when you can expand your own brand?

• Zero experience needed. If you have never resold an account, or even if you have never built a website, you can still join our reseller program and resell all our hosting services. Our system will create a fully functional website for you, so you will only have to choose the plans that you want to sell, and then set their prices.

• Multiple storefront options. We offer different options for your storefront, depending on how experienced you are and how involved you want to be. You can add a domain name and use a ready-made website; add our plugin to a WordPress website; integrate our widget into an existing website; or if you are more advanced, you can use our API with your own platform.

Cons

• Requires more effort to find customers. It may take some time until you find your niche in the market or build a name so that new customers start looking for you instead of the other way around. Sometimes you may just need some luck. You will have to spend some time and effort to find customers, especially in the beginning.

• Large competition. There are thousands of hosting providers on the market, so it may be difficult to find your place at first. They will have different offers and different prices. You can try to beat them by offering high quality services and exceptional tech support, for instance.

• Pricing. If you come across similar programs from other providers, you will notice that you should always set prices that are higher than the prices of your hosting provider. Such a thing puts you at a disadvantage. This is why we have listed pricing in this section. With our increasing discounts, however, this will not be the case with our free reseller program. If you have 7+ accounts/clients, you (and your customers respectively) can order new accounts with a 90% discount and renew existing ones with a 50% discount. This way, even if you add a significant profit, you can still offer plans at lower prices compared to the prices that direct customers can see on our website. Nonetheless, you cannot offer free trials or anything like that (we mention it because people have asked us about it).

• More time-consuming. Finding and dealing with customers, especially the ones you know personally, takes some time. If they contact you directly, you should either help them, or contact our tech support. Either way, you will have to spend some time resolving the issue.

The ICDSoft affiliate program

With our hosting affiliate program, you can make decent money without doing almost anything. You will have a unique link leading to our website. If anybody signs up for a hosting plan, you will receive a 75% commission. Unlike other affiliate programs that pay a one-time signup commission, we will pay you for two consecutive renewals for annual plans, and for 11 monthly renewals for monthly plans as well. This way, depending on the plan and the period a customer uses it, you can earn between 95% and 185% of the plan price as a commission. Find out more about it on our website: https://www.icdsoft.com/en/affiliate/terms.

The affiliate account is managed through the Account panel that we provide to all our partners – affiliates, resellers and direct customers.

Pros

• Easy to start. If you want to join our affiliate program, you only have to sign up and accept the Affiliate Terms of Service. You will see your unique link right away, so you can start posting it wherever you see fit.

• No responsibilities. When a client signs up through your affiliate link, we will open the account, send the login details and support the customer. You will have no responsibilities of any sort.

• Multiple banners. Talking about banners, we have a lot of them. You will find dozens of banners of various sizes that promote different services in the Affiliate section of the Account panel. You will not have to create banners on your own – simply type a name for the banner, then copy the HTML code from your account and paste it wherever you want the banner to appear.

• Passive income. After you add banners/links that lead potential customers to our website, you can simply sit back and relax. Our affiliate program is a good choice for earning passive income. You won’t have to do anything except to check every now and then if your links are still active, or to post new ones.
• Unlimited earning potential. There is no minimum or maximum number of clients you can send to our website. The more people who sign up for a service through your link, the better. If you find a niche (private forum, university class, etc.), you will have a source of regular income.

• No minimum payout. We send commissions every week, and there is no minimum amount that you should earn for a payout.

• No risk. You don’t have to invest anything, you will not be processing payments, and you will not have to work with customers, so there is absolutely no risk for you.

Cons

• No commission for additional purchases. We are always honest with all our partners, so this is something we have to mention. We pay a commission for every sign up for a hosting plan, but we do not pay one for plan extras (backup, dedicated IP address, additional traffic), domain registrations and SSL certificates. If you send a potential customer to our website and they purchase only a domain name, they won’t appear in your affiliate account.

• No plan/price flexibility. The features of our hosting plans, the prices and the billing periods are set, and you cannot change them. This is valid for plan renewals where you cannot offer a custom discount. For the initial signup you can offer a discount by creating a promo code and choosing the commission you will earn. If you choose a bigger discount for the customer, you will earn a smaller commission.

• Does not bring value to an established business. If you already offer a certain set of services and you have many customers, you cannot take advantage of that as you will have to send people to a different company. If you want all services to be under your brand name, you should not use an affiliate account, but a reseller one.

So, which one should you choose?

Both the free reseller program and the affiliate program are managed through the same Account Panel, so a single signup allows you to try and use either one, or even both. Depending on your experience, the amount of time you can spend and how involved you want to be, you can choose to promote either your brand, or ours.

If you offer IT-related services and you want to expand your portfolio, or you want to try to start your own web hosting company, you can open a free reseller account. We will give you a great start with a wide variety of plans, competitive prices and outstanding white label support.

If you already have a well-established website, and you want to find another source of income, but you don’t have much free time to start something new, or you simply want to try something risk-free, you can join our affiliate program and try to monetize the traffic to your existing website.