• Common signs of eCommerce fraud
• Easy ways to prevent fraud

Red Flags for eCommerce Fraud

It’s hard to believe that your business is not immune to eCommerce fraud. However, the truth is, even if you take all precautions and employ best practices, there are still risks for your company. That being said, it is always important to educate yourself on signs of impending fraud so you can work on preventing any issues as they pop up: Here are some of the most common signs of fraud to look out for:

1. More Than One Card on an IP Address

An IP address with multiple cards can be a red flag. To avoid being caught, most fraudsters will attempt numerous transactions with the same card.

2. Large Quantities of Your Product Are Being Purchased

If you offer a product with high demand, it’s expected to have larger and more consistent purchases. However, large quantities purchased from multiple locations by the same person or group can indicate fraud.

3. Shipping to Unusual Locations

If the shipping address does not match the product, this is a red flag. This could mean the person is ordering with a stolen credit card.

4. Different IP Address Compared to the Shipping Address

If the person’s IP address making the purchase differs from their location, this is a red flag. Most likely, this person uses a VPN or other service to hide their location. Also, keep in mind that the billing and shipping addresses may be different.

5. Many Transactions in a Very Small Period

Multiple transactions in a short amount of time is an indication that something could be wrong. Fraudsters usually test your business with small purchases before making larger purchases.

Ways to Prevent Fraud

As a business owner, it is your responsibility to prevent fraud in any way possible. There are many ways you can do this, and we will go over the most effective methods below:

1. Analyze and Assess Fraud Risks With Fraud Assessment Tools

Fraud assessment tools will allow you to assess your risk for fraud. This can be done in real-time and provide information about the likelihood of fraud occurring.

2. Update High-Quality Software Helping You Run Things

If you’re using software that is not up-to-date or effective, then it can open your business to fraud. You must have high-quality software that is constantly being updated.

3. Download Fraud Detection and Management Software

Fraud Detection and Management Software is the only way that you can truly protect your business. Whatever software solution you choose, make sure it’s designed to monitor transactions in real-time so that any fraudulent activity will be detected immediately.

3. Keep PCI Compliance

Disregarding PCI compliance is a huge risk. If you are not following the rules, your business can be liable for any credit card fraud on their website or store. This means that you could have legal issues to deal with and loss of revenue and reputation if it’s determined that your negligence led to fraudulent activity.

4. Use RBA (Risk-Based Authentication)

RBA is the only way that you can truly verify someone’s identity. This method ensures that all customers need to provide additional information before they purchase in order for it to be approved.

5. Require CVV Numbers on All Purchases

Requiring CVVs on all transactions can be a huge deterrent for fraudsters. This is because they only tend to make purchases with stolen credit cards or through online retailers that don’t require this information.

6. Use HTTPS Protocol

Using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure will ensure that all of your transactions are encrypted. This prevents any potential hackers from gaining access to your data, and it also provides another layer of security on top of SSL certificates.

7. Use AVS (Address Verification System)

Address verification ensures that the billing information and shipping address match up. If they don’t, this can be a red flag for fraudsters who use stolen credit cards or purchase goods online without having them shipped.

Conclusion

Another great way to avoid fraud is by ensuring a high-quality web hosting company hosts your website. A2 Hosting offers secure and dependable service, so we’re here for you if something goes wrong. With 24/7/365 support and a 99.9% uptime commitment,+*969* we’re available for our customers when you need us.

Our sales teams will help you choose a plan that’s perfect for any business size. Let us take care of everything so that you don’t have to worry about anything but growing your business. Contact us today!

The post The Secret to Identifying and Preventing eCommerce Fraud (7 Easy Steps) appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Continue reading to explore what web hosting is and what the common types of hosting are. Learn why it is important to find a first-rate web host provider and discover which web host provider has the fastest hosting service and what kinds of plans they offer.

What Is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is an internet hosting service that hosts websites and web pages on behalf of businesses and individuals.

The backend and files of websites are stored on servers. Internet users can view a website by typing its URL address on their browser or by clicking on a link. The users’ computers will be linked to the server so that the webpage will load on their browser.

During the early days of the Internet, companies and persons were required to have their own computer or server to host a website. However, not everyone could afford to buy technological equipment or hire in-house professionals who specialize in website hosting. The need for web hosting services started to grow as the number of Internet users all over the world began to increase exponentially.

These are some of the popular types of web hosting:

• Shared Hosting: It involves the sharing of server space among various websites. The shared resources typically include the CPU (Central Processing Unit) and RAM (Random Access Memory). It is ideal for businesses that plan to build new websites because it is priced relatively low and allows for growth.
• Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting: It offers more control than shared hosting, but less control than dedicated hosting. Every website is allotted its own space and reserved resources within the parameters of the server making it a virtual private environment while still sharing hardware. It is appropriate for businesses with existing websites with low to medium amounts of traffic.
• Dedicated Hosting: It allows the webmaster, who is the owner of the website, to have almost full control of the site. The webmaster can manage the administration access, select the security features, and pick the operating system of the server. It is suitable for businesses with existing websites that have a high amount of traffic. This arrangement is usually preferred by companies with an in-house IT department that can oversee the site unless they have a managed plan which we outline below.
• Managed Hosting: This is most common type of web hosting service and can be added to Shared, VPS, and Dedicated hosting. In this scenario, the web host is in charge of server maintenance rather than the webmaster. The webmaster is freed from the responsibility of maintaining the operating system, software, and hardware related to the website. The website owner just needs to select the hosting package that will suit the needs of the business. This form of hosting is appropriate for businesses that plan to build and maintain websites with minimal effort. A2 Hosting has managed shared, VPS and dedicated hosting plans to choose from!

Why Is It Important To Have a Good Web Host?

A web host is a company that provides web hosting services to businesses and individuals. There are several reasons why any business needs to have an excellent web host:

1. Optimized Data Storage

It is critical for a business to have a dependable web host that offers ample data storage options. Proper data storage enables a website to handle more online traffic. Storage limitations can cause a site to shut down when the amount of traffic is high.

2. Secure Server

A competent web host can improve the cyber security of a business website. It ensures the safety of the network space to safeguard the website files and customer information from being accessed by outsiders. It blocks hacker attacks, phishing attempts, and other kinds of cybercrimes.

3. Zero To Minimal Downtime

Downtime refers to the timeframe when the website is not available online for various reasons. Whether it is scheduled or unscheduled, downtime can be detrimental to a business if it occurs often. It reduces opportunities for lead generation and conversion. Plus, frequent downtime makes a website seem unprofessional. That’s why it is critical for a business to select a dependable server with zero to minimal downtime.

4. Backup Protection

A business should work with a website host that offers backup options. Backup measures will allow the team to roll back the website in case of technical issues. A website must have backups so that a business will not lose important data.

5. Email Services

A business will appear more professional if the team members use customized email addresses that are related to the domain name, instead of communicating via free email accounts from popular email services.

Official work email addresses can help a business build a reputation as a credible, legitimate organization. Email hosting is one of the basic but essential features that a web host should offer in their packages.

6. Customer Service

A commendable web host should always be prepared to provide technical support to a business in case they encounter problems with their website. The company should provide alternative ways for their clients to contact them whenever they need professional assistance.

7. Flexible Pricing Options

Different businesses have varying budgets when it comes to web hosting. That’s why a business should choose a web host that offers multiple packages that they can choose from. This will allow the team to pick the plan that suits them best, based on their estimated budget and the specific services they need.

The availability of various packages also grants flexibility to a business. It allows the team to customize their plan in the future, in case they will need more server power, data speed, and storage space as their business expands over time.

8. Speed

Speed is one of the most important factors that a business should consider when choosing a web host. Slow website speeds can discourage users from spending time on a website. The user experience of website visitors will suffer if each web page takes too long to load. A business team should select a web host with the fastest hosting service to ensure swift loading speeds.

Why Is It Important To Have a Fast Website?

Having a fast website can be advantageous to any business in various ways. These are some of the benefits of having a quick-loading website:

1. Online Visibility

The website is a central marketing tool because it can increase the online visibility of a business. It has a significant impact on the marketing efforts of any company, in spite of the availability of other social media channels. The content and structure of a website should be strategic for it to be effective.

A website must feature basic information about the business, as well as its products and services. It should include compelling landing page copy that catches the attention of the audience. It ought to focus on results-driven solutions to the problems or needs of the target market.

Last but not least, a website should have fast loading times. No matter how well-crafted the content is, Internet users will not explore a website if the web pages are loading too slowly. A speedy website will motivate visitors to read the content so that they will learn more about the business and the brand.

2. Lead Generation

A fast website can result in lead generation for a business. Lead generation is the process of attracting attention and sparking the interest of future customers. Leads are people with the potential to purchase the products or subscribe to the services of a company someday.

A website that functions smoothly and swiftly can transform website visitors and prospects into leads. It can enable a business to develop connections with leads by featuring relevant content that is tailored to their wants, needs, and demographic information.

3. Lead Conversion

A website is a tool that can promote lead conversion for a business. Lead conversion is a sales and marketing procedure that converts leads into actual customers through retargeting, behavior automation, and relationship development.

A website that is quickly and easily accessible allows a business team to nourish their leads in each step of the marketing process. It can serve as a central venue where leads can morph into customers by taking concrete action, such as buying a product, utilizing a service, or signing up as a paid subscriber.

4. Sales and Profits

An official website can play a role in increasing the sales and profits of a business. Sales refer to the total amount of income that a business earns from selling its products and services. Profits are defined as the amount of income that remains after the costs, expenses, and taxes have been subtracted from the sales.

A fast website has the potential to boost the sales and profits of a business by showcasing the benefits of its products and services through text information, photos, videos, testimonials, blog posts, and customer reviews.

5. Business Growth

A website can be instrumental to the overall growth of a business. It can help the team to achieve their goals and objectives in every stage of the marketing and sales process. It can also increase brand awareness and improve the reputation of the company over time. It gives the team more opportunities to establish new professional connections and to strengthen existing customer relationships.

Nevertheless, the general efficacy of a business website in achieving optimal results is largely dependent on its speed. That’s why a business team should ensure that the web host they select can provide fast loading times for their website.

Which Web Host Provides the Fastest Hosting Service

The speed of a website can determine how effective it is in contributing to the success of a business. That’s why you must choose a web host that is capable of providing impressively swift speeds for your business website.

A2 Hosting is the ideal option for startups, reseller agencies, companies, and organizations who need the fastest hosting service for their websites.

Who Is A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is a website hosting provider that offers up to 20X faster web hosting speeds for businesses. Our high-performance solutions are suitable for everyone in the business industry, ranging from first-timers who wish to develop new blogs to professional developers with high-traffic websites.

A2 Hosting was founded by our CEO Bryan Muthig in 2001 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He utilized his strong technical background as a UNIX systems administrator and his passion for technology to establish a global hosting company.

At present, we have more than 200 hundred teammates and various data centers in 223 countries all over the globe. Our company has provided 120,000 active services and counting to our clients. An estimated 110,000 people have already used A2 Hosting products.

Our mission is to help people to thrive in the online world so that they can succeed in the real world. We harness our skills, knowledge, and resources to make it possible for others to bring their digital visions to life.

A2 Hosting has gained recognition as a reliable hosting provider in the web hosting industry. We have received awards and accolades that highlight the accomplishments of our team as we continue to empower our customers with the best web host solutions.

What Are the Benefits of A2 Hosting Services

These are many reasons why A2 Hosting is superior to other web host providers. These are some of the important advantages of choosing A2 Hosting and our services:

• Faster Speed: We offer up to 20X faster web hosting speed for business websites.
• Better Results: We can help small businesses and agencies gain improved SEO rankings, reduced bounce rates, and increased conversion rates.
• Accessible Customer Service: We provide 24/7/365 technical assistance through our friendly, skilled, and knowledgeable guru crew support team.
• Free Account Migration: We can move your website from your previous web host to A2 hosting for free.
• Risk-free Trial: We offer you a money-back guarantee if you are interested in trying our hosting services.
• Reliable Servers: We commit to 99.9% uptime so you can rest assured about the dependability of our servers.

What Plans Does A2 Hosting Offer

A2 Hosting offers a variety of web hosting packages to suit the multiple needs of our different clients. These are the plans from A2 Hosting that you can choose from:

Shared Web Hosting

The Shared Web Hosting service of A2 Hosting is powered by our top-of-the-line servers. All our servers are optimized for speed. Each server is only limited to a certain number of clients. This industry-leading web hosting service features 20X faster page load times at an affordable cost. You can experience an excellent combination of performance enhancements, resources, and limited occupancy if you subscribe to one of the shared hosting packages.

Here are the pricing plans for Shared Web Hosting:

• Startup: $2.99 USD monthly*
• Drive: $5.99 USD monthly*
• Turbo Boost: $6.99 USD monthly*
• Turbo Max: $12.99 USD monthly*

VPS Hosting

The VPS Hosting service of A2 Hosting features dedicated resources for maximum power. Because you will be allotted your own dedicated resources, you will have the advantage of enhanced server reliability and performance. This cost-effective model allows you to experience the benefits of a BMD server without the price tag. Our plans include 24/7 Guru Support, free SSL Certificates, and free website migrations.

Here are the various VPS Hosting plans with assorted VPS features for different management levels:

Unmanaged VPS Hosting

Unmanaged VPS Hosting allows you to configure the settings and requirements of the server operating system and other software that you plan to run at the server level. Keep in mind that this level of configuration is ideal for people with a high degree of technical skills.

• Runway 1: $4.99 USD monthly*
• Runway 2: $7.99 USD monthly*
• Runway 4: $9.99 USD monthly*
• Supersonic 8: $34.99 USD monthly*
• Supersonic 16: $54.99 USD monthly*
• Supersonic 32: $74.99 USD monthly*

Managed VPS Hosting

Managed VPS features high-level maintenance service from our team. It ensures that your server is regularly upgraded, fixed, and adjusted to increase the security levels of your business website. Managed plans are worth the extra investment because we will efficiently handle all the crucial management tasks on your behalf.

• Lift 4: $39.99 USD monthly*
• Lift 8: $54.99 USD monthly*
• Lift 16: $67.99 USD monthly*
• Mach 8: $59.99 USD monthly*
• Mach 16: $89.99 USD monthly*
• Mach 32: $99.99 USD monthly*

Bare Metal Dedicated Servers

The Bare Metal Dedicated Servers of A2 Hosting will allow you to select between Intel or AMD processors. They also include advanced NVMe storage options for your business website.

Here are the available Bare Metal Dedicated Servers plans:

Unmanaged Bare Metal Dedicated Servers

• Hyper 1: $129.99 USD monthly*
• Hyper 2I: $199.99 USD monthly*
• Hyper 2 Turbo Intel: $219.99 USD monthly*
• Hyper 3 AMD: $509.99 USD monthly*
• Hyper 3 Turbo AMD: $539.99 USD monthly*

Managed Bare Metal Dedicated Servers

• Warp 1: $179.99 USD monthly*
• Warp 2 Intel: $249.99 USD monthly*
• Warp 2 Turbo Intel: $279.99 USD monthly*

Reseller Hosting

The Reseller Hosting service of A2 Hosting enables you to begin your own hosting business. Selling our white-labeled reseller solutions allows you to make income, manage your customers, and run your own hosting company. We will grant you full control of the various aspects of your business. We will utilize servers with AMD EPYC CPUs and NVMEe drives to set up your reseller package.

Here are the Reseller Hosting plans we have available:

• Kickstart: $18.99 USD monthly*
• Turbo Kickstart: $24.99 USD monthly*
• Launch: $24.99 USD monthly*
• Turbo Launch: $32.99 USD monthly*

Turbo Web Hosting

All our web hosting packages have turbo versions for increased power and speed. These are the impressive features of Turbo Web Hosting plans that you can take advantage of:

• LiteSpeed Web Server: It is a speed-enhanced, drop-in web server alternative to Apache. It allows you to experience up to 20X faster page loads.
• NVMe: It is a non-volatile memory express (NVMe) Hosting solution that generates 3X faster read/write speeds.
• HTTP/3: It is a cutting-edge web standard that enables quicker and more stable connections for APIs and websites.
• ESI: Edge Side Includes (ESI) lets you conveniently designate portions of your web page as cacheable or non-cacheable.
• QUIC: Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is a speed-enhanced alternative to TCP. It minimizes latency by forming multiplexed connections among computers in a network.

Learn more about our Turbo Plans by viewing the turbo options for each type of web hosting package that A2 Hosting offers.

Contact the A2 Hosting Sales Team to Sign Up for the Fastest Hosting Service

Whether you own a reselling agency, startup, or company, a fast website is a powerful marketing tool that allows your business to reach new heights of success. Partnership with the fastest hosting service allows you to transform your site for the better.

A2 Hosting is the best option for you if you are committed to leveling up the speed and security of your business website. Contact our sales team today if you have questions about our exponentially fast web hosting services. Sign up for our web hosting plans to start speeding up your website.

The post Who Has the Fastest Web Hosting? Matching Your Need for Speed appeared first on The A2 Posting.

But did you know that proper hosting is also important in establishing a good business reputation?

Through web hosting services, a website can provide amazing user experiences that will improve any brand’s image in its market. The opposite is true with a poor hosting solution. This can lead to poor user experiences that reduce your engagement significantly.

So how can you choose the right web hosting solutions for your website?

To help you decide, we’ve prepared a brief guide on the crucial things to know when choosing web hosting services.

How to Choose the Right Web Hosting Services

There are at least five factors to consider when deciding on the ideal web hosting service for your needs. Getting the highest levels on all these factors will ensure that your website can provide an excellent user experience.

These factors are:

Web Hosting Service Factor #1: Speed

The speed of your web hosting service provider is one of the first and most important factors you should consider. Hosting speed is a priority consideration as it shows how fast a provider can load web pages.

Websites that can load quickly often translate to a better user experience since most people won’t stay if a page takes a long time to load. With a slow website, your customers are more likely to leave your page and opt for competitors instead.

When talking about hosting performance, the software stack or server technology used by a provider is one thing to look out for. With technology evolving at a rapid pace, it’s important to have a web host that can adapt quickly and employ the latest tech advancements for maximum speeds.

At A2 Hosting we offer Turbo hosting plans that are designed to provide users with the best speeds for their websites. The limited occupancy of these plans minimizes the number of resources being used while optimized server configurations ensure top performance.

Furthermore, our Turbo packages take advantage of the latest server hardware and software technologies in the market, providing as much as 20x faster page load speeds than the competition. Websites hosted on their turbos plans can handle 9x more traffic with 3x faster read/write speeds.

Web Hosting Service Factor #2: Reliability

Reliability or the uptime of web hosting services is the second most important aspect to consider. Your host’s reliability refers to how often a site is going to be available and accessible to the public.

Besides a slow-loading website, one that can’t be visited is one of the worst things businesses can experience. An inaccessible site, even if it’s just for a few hours, can significantly reduce conversion rates.

Brand websites that experience frequent downtimes can expect their images to be tarnished. No lead or customer would want to visit a website only to find out that it’s not available. Catering to the needs of the target market at all times should be a top priority for your business website.

One way you can avoid experiencing downtimes as much as possible is by leveraging a hosting solution that is guaranteed to have at least 99% uptime. Anything lower than that would drastically reduce conversions.

At A2 Hosting we take advantage of tried and tested technologies, ensuring that all of our customers get 99.99% uptime from our web hosting services.

Web Hosting Service Factor #3: Security

As you browse for your potential hosting solutions provider, you should consider the levels of security they have to offer for new and existing customers. This is particularly important at the server level since this is where most of your site’s resources are stored.

For instance, you want to check if they apply the newest operating system patches to your server. Patches and updates are vital for servers to have as few vulnerabilities as possible. You should also check if they provide DDoS protection and high-level firewalls to filter potentially malicious traffic.

Besides cybersecurity, backups are equally important as well. Backup solutions provide you with a repository containing saved business data that you can fall back on if the worst should happen.

With A2 Hosting, you can leverage secure web hosting services that provide you with top-notch protection and stability for your website. We work on the OpenVPN virtual private network so that our users can work from site to site and point to point without worrying about their security. OpenVPN, in particular, comes with security features such as network address translation (NAT) protection.

Meanwhile, our Brute Force Protection solution lets you block cybercriminals using methods such as IP routing, APF, and custom commands.

Other security features you can find from our packages include:

• ConfigServer and Firewall (CSF) login security
• Linux malware detection solutions
• Linux environment security
• SSL certificates
• Secure Shell (SSH) login security solution
• SimpleRisk risk management solution

At A2 Hosting, our goal is to help you identify potential security threats and resolve them before they become worse. Our secure servers utilize the latest and proven cybersecurity solutions so you can have around-the-clock protection for your websites.

Web Hosting Service Factor #4: Features and Add-Ons

Features and add-ons are always great to have in any web hosting service. The main reason for this is that these added options let you scale up when needed, especially when you wish to expand to a new market.

A2 Hosting offers customers quite a few add-on solutions that can help improve site security, functionality, usability, and experience. These additional options are:

• Cloudflare: The content delivery network (CDN) known as Cloudflare is a service that we provide to our web hosting customers free of charge. We offer a knowledge base of tutorials that will teach you how to set up and get started with Cloudflare.
• SSL certificates: SSL certificate is a necessary add-on solution for any website, especially in terms of ramping up security. Using the right SSL certificate, site owners can make sure that their website data are encrypted while making themselves more trustworthy to their visitors.
• WHMCS hosting: Resellers looking to leverage A2 Hosting’s plans can take advantage of WHMCS since we also support hosting with this feature. You can learn everything from configuring OpenSRS access for WHMCS to ordering a WHMCS license with us.
• Domain and SSL reseller: Again, for resellers or those using managed VPS or managed dedicated server accounts, you can turn into an SSL or eNom domain reseller with A2 Hosting.
• Promotions: Promotional programs are available when you pick A2 Hosting as your web hosting services provider. You can even access a knowledge base containing information on programs for affiliates, refer-a-friend, and more.
• cPanel licensing: Dedicated, cloud VPS, and unmanaged VPS servers normally don’t have cPanel included in their accounts. With A2 Hosting, cPanel licensing in included with many of our plans.
• MailChimp account setup: We can help you sign up for a MailChimp account and teach you how to generate API keys. The latter should help you integrate MailChimp with your A2 Hosting website so you can manage your newsletters and drip campaigns easily.
• Dropmysite: The Dropmysite cPanel plugin lets you keep track of your websites and configure backups for your data. A2 Hosting will provide you with all of the resources you need to make the most of Dropmysite.
• Ordering a Blesta license: Looking to leverage Blesta for your website? A2 Hosting will guide you throughout the process so you can maximize your reseller hosting package with us.

Web Hosting Service Factor #5: Support

If you’ve found a web hosting provider that has the hardware, software, and features that you need, then the next logical step is to consider their support. Does your chosen provider have the expertise, equipment, and resources to ensure you get the best levels of service at all times?

Here are a few aspects to consider when it comes to support:

• Support level: When it comes to a host’s level of support, you need to consider the level of support your business website needs. For instance, do you require VPS, cloud hosting, or dedicated server support? What about WooCommerce or WordPress? Does your host offer help on those platforms? Are you looking for a managed plan where your host takes care of all of your backend server needs or looking to manage it yourself?
• Contact methods: The next aspect to consider is how your provider gets in touch with you in terms of support. Do they offer telephone and live chat or just email? Having an online support ticket system can be crucial, especially for business websites. A2 Hosting offers ticket, live chat, email, and phone calls 24/7/365!
• Ability to respond: Besides being able to contact them through multiple methods, you should also learn how quickly they can address your issue. In case your website goes down, you want to know how long before it gets back up so you can get back to business as soon as possible.
• How quickly they resolve issues: Similar to the above, resolution time is another thing to consider with your web hosting provider. Some hosts pass the concerns of their customers to third-party support providers, which can take several days to be resolved. You want to leverage the support services of a company that can resolve all of your issues themselves. At A2 Hosting we have an extensive in house support team, otherwise know as our guru crew.
• Operating times: Finally, you want to check and ensure your web host can provide around-the-clock support. 24/7 customer service is a must nowadays especially for website owners that can experience problems at any time of the day or night. That’s why A2 Hosting has someone there to help you 24/7/365!

At A2 Hosting, our web hosting services come with the highest levels of support you can expect from a premium provider. We are available to answer inquiries or resolve issues of our customers whenever they need us.

In case you want to learn more about our services, you can visit our support page that contains all of the information you need on various hosting solutions.

Which Level of Hosting Plan Is Right for You?

So which level of web hosting plan fits your needs? Consider the short overview below and click this link to take our free quiz!

Shared Web Hosting Plan

Our Shared Web Hosting plan is our most affordable hosting solution that lets you share resources such as disk space, data transfer, and processing power. It also comes with cPanel, server backups, and unlimited storage.

VPS Hosting Plan

On our VPS Hosting plans you share the same server with other sites, but you get to operate your account independently. This means you get your own allotted amount of resources! If you choose our managed plans back-end server maintenance is handled for you.

Dedicated Hosting Plan

Looking for a premium hosting solution? Our dedicated hosting plan means that you get the highest performance, best features, and a private server solely for all of your business website needs.

Conclusion

These are the most important aspects you should know about choosing a web hosting service. Following the tips provided in this post will help guide you in getting the right solution for your website.

If you have any questions about our web hosting services, contact our sales team today. Interested in finding out which plan is right for you? I encourage you to take our free quiz to help you decide!

The post Crucial Things to Know When Choosing Web Hosting Services appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Fortunately, you don’t need a multi-million dollar budget or even a dedicated team to deliver exceptional customer service. With a few simple tricks, tools, and free software, you can offer the kind of assistance that your clients deserve.

In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of delivering a five-star customer service experience. Then we’ll share eight tips for optimizing your reseller hosting customer support to keep clients happy. Let’s get started!

An Overview of Five-Star Customer Support

As a hosting provider, you don’t necessarily have to offer support to all your customers. For example, you might only extend it to clients who purchase a premium package.

It can also be difficult to find the bandwidth to offer support, particularly when you’re in the early phases of launching a reseller hosting business. However, wherever possible, we recommend offering a high level of customer support to all your clients. Ideally, it should be available 24/7 and via multiple channels.

Whenever a user reaches out for help, their experience will influence whether they remain a loyal customer or take their business elsewhere. By helping clients resolve their issues quickly and efficiently, you can boost your retention rates. You’ll also be in a stronger position to upsell them.

Delivering five-star customer support 24/7 may feel like a difficult task. However, it’s an effective way to stand out from the competition and grow your reseller hosting business.

Happy customers are also the best way to advertise your business. In a world where nearly all businesses need web hosting, every satisfied customer could recommend your services to a huge number of people. By contrast, dissatisfied clients can inflict serious damage on your reputation. If your support is unhelpful, unreliable, or just plain difficult to contact, people will hear about it, and you’ll lose out on potential sales.

It’s sometimes easy to think of customer support as something that happens after a successful sale. However, giving potential clients a taste of your stellar support in advance can be a powerful way to drive conversions. If the prospect has questions, it should be easy for them to get answers.

How to Deliver Five-Star Reseller Hosting Customer Support (8 Tips)

It doesn’t matter how affordable and reliable your reseller hosting services are. If your customer support is lacking, people will likely complain. Not only can this make it challenging to maintain high retention rates, but you may also find it difficult to attract any new clients.

The good news is that you can provide top-notch support and gain a loyal audience with some simple steps. Let’s take a look at eight helpful tips for consistently delivering excellent customer service.

1. Determine Your Support Availability

Ideally, your support staff will be available any time of the day and night. However, this isn’t always feasible for startups and smaller businesses, which typically work with limited resources.

The key is to be upfront with your customers. While the promise of 24/7 support may attract new clients, they’ll quickly lose patience if you fail to deliver on that promise. If you can only realistically provide assistance within a certain time frame, it’s important to inform people in advance.

Over-promising and under-delivering will almost always lead to a poor customer experience. It could also damage your reputation as a reliable and trustworthy hosting provider.

When determining your availability, it’s crucial to consider your time zone and the your customer support department size. However, to get maximum Return On Investment (ROI), it’s also smart to consider your target audience’s hours of operation. If your biggest customer is operational from 9am–5pm Eastern Standard Time (EST), it may make sense to adopt these as your standard support hours, regardless of your own time zone.

Your availability will also be determined by the kind of support you offer. Telephone or live-chat support requires your staff to be on-hand. This can limit your support accessibility, so it’s crucial to take this into consideration when drawing up your contracts.

Wherever possible, we recommend offering at least one automated support channel, such as a chatbot or ticket-based system. These automated options can create the impression of around-the-clock support, even when your staff isn’t physically available:

You may also want to consider offering self-help resources, which we’ll discuss more in a moment. This gives customers the ability to find their own answers, at any time of the day or night.

2. Offer Support via Multiple Channels

Every customer support request is different. For example, some might require immediate attention, such as if your customer’s business-critical site goes offline. Others will have a more forgiving timescale.

Similarly, clients may prefer to access support in different ways. Many people prefer to speak to a person directly over the telephone. Some feel more comfortable discussing their support issues digitally over live chat. There are also plenty of customers who favor solving technical problems themselves by reading online documentation and blogs.

To ensure that you’re providing the best experience to all your customers, it’s smart to offer support via multiple channels. Popular options include telephone support, ticket-based systems, live chat, chatbots, and self-help resources such as wikis:

You can also create Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) using a tool such as phpMyFAQ. If you’re an A2 Hosting reseller, you can install this multilingual, database-driven FAQ system via your account’s built-in Softaculous installer:

By offering multi-channel support, you can give customers the flexibility to choose the method that’s most appropriate for their requests. If they can do that, you’re already off to a strong start – even if the client is making a complaint. Alternatively, if you force your users to contact you through an inconvenient channel, you’re putting them in a frustrating position, even if their issue is relatively minor.

If you’re an A2 Hosting reseller, all your clients will receive a cPanel account as standard. You can then customize this cPanel to include information about how to contact your customer support. This ensures that they are aware of all their options and have easy access to all your service channels.

3. Provide Self-Help Resources

When faced with a technical problem, some people prefer to find answers themselves. This may be a personal preference, as not everyone feels comfortable communicating over the phone. It may also be necessitated due to the customer’s busy schedule or a time-zone conflict. Some users may also prefer self-help resources if there’s a language barrier between themselves and your support staff.

Studies suggest that 81 percent of customers try to resolve an issue themselves before reaching out to a live representative. This figure suggests that self-service may be the preferred method of customer support for the majority of your audience. Therefore, it’s important to offer at least one self-help customer support channel.

One option is to use a plugin such as Echo Knowledge Base. This lets you build a library of documentation and resources.

Thanks to the built-in Softaculous installer, A2 Hosting customers can access all the software they need to build a robust self-help portal. This includes blogging software, FAQ systems, and MediaWiki:

MediaWiki is the software that’s used to power Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata. Using this tool, you can build a wiki that feels instantly familiar to any customer who’s ever visited the hugely popular Wikipedia platform. This ensures they can navigate your resource with ease, and find exactly the information they need to resolve their problem – without having to speak to customer support.

4. Offer Multilingual Customer Support to Your International Audience

As a hosting reseller, you have the potential to connect with an international audience. With 74 percent of internet users speaking a language other than English, offering multilingual customer support can greatly increase your client base. It can also help your customer service achieve that five-star status, as 65 percent of consumers prefer to access content in their native languages.

For the best results, try to recruit multilingual representatives to your support team wherever possible. Native speakers can help reduce miscommunications and ensure that your staff follows cultural etiquette. This can increase the chances of international clients coming away with a positive impression of your customer service.

It’s a good idea to support as many languages as possible, but this isn’t always practical. To get the highest possible ROI, it’s smart to identify the most popular languages among your current audience. Then you can hire people who speak these particular languages. You can analyze your customer base using an analytics platform such as Google Analytics.

It’s important to note that multilingual customer support isn’t limited to telephone conversations. If you offer live chat support, you may want to opt for a solution that supports multiple languages, such as phpFreeChat:

If you provide self-help resources such as wikis or tutorials, you can also translate these resources into multiple languages. When doing so, we recommend hiring a native speaker or partnering with a localization agency that has access to such staff. You can then upload the translations to your reseller hosting website or customer support portal using a plugin such as Polylang:

The free Polylang plugin adds a language picker to your website. This enables customers to access your self-help resources in their preferred language.

5. Demonstrate That You Value the Customer’s Time

According to research, 66 percent of customers believe that valuing their time is the most important factor in customer service. If you offer support via multiple channels, customers can choose the channel that’s the most convenient for them. This means you’re already off to a strong start.

Callbacks can be another way to demonstrate that you value the customer’s time. This helps you avoid a situation where busy clients are left in a support queue. A2 Hosting users can offer appointment scheduling using the Booked scheduler tools available via Softaculous:

Once the customer has reached your support staff, the race is on to resolve their issue as efficiently as possible. According to research, 82 percent of consumers expect an immediate response to their requests – and they define “immediate response” as ten minutes or less.

Responding to every request within this time frame is a surefire way to make your customers feel valued. However, this isn’t always possible, particularly if you’re a smaller business. Some support requests may also be complex and require in-depth investigation or even escalating to a specialist.

In these situations, it may help to acknowledge that you’ve received the customer’s inquiry and will respond to them as soon as possible. Many ticketing systems have an autoresponder built-in. For example, osTicket has a customizable automatic response.

Alternatively, you might display a popup confirming that you’ve received their request. If you have a dedicated support email address, you might want to use an email auto-responder.

6. Use Chatbots to Automate and Streamline Customer Support

You can use chatbots to offer live, personalized customer support, even when your staff isn’t currently available. This can be useful for businesses with limited resources, or if your users span multiple time zones.

According to research, more than 67 percent of consumers worldwide used a chatbot for customer support in 2019. This suggests that customers are happy to use the technology in order to access the help they need.

Even if you plan to provide 24/7 support, chatbots can be a powerful tool for streamlining the support process. For example, you might use a chatbot to gather essential information about the customer’s issue and to schedule a callback. Your team can then contact the person with the relevant information already on-hand. This will immediately make your staff seem more knowledgeable, and provide a more positive customer experience.

Alternatively, you can use chatbots to collect details about the problem, then forward them to an appropriate self-help resource. According to reports, 73 percent of customers prefer to use a company’s website over other forms of customer support. However, 55 percent find web self-service portals difficult to use.

By combining self-help resources with a chatbot, your users can access support via their preferred channels, and with minimal effort. You can implement one using a WordPress plugin such as ChatBot:

You can use this plug-and-play chatbot to display text responses that you create in the WordPress dashboard. Alternatively, you can give ChatBot natural language processing powers by integrating it with Google’s Dialogflow.

7. Request Customer Feedback

No matter how much time and effort you invest into providing five-star customer support, there is always room for improvement. To ensure that you’re consistently moving forward, it’s vital to gather customer feedback.

Demonstrating an interest in someone’s opinion can make them feel valued. This means that simply asking for feedback can improve the customer experience.

Occasionally, there may be a situation where the customer service doesn’t live up to your usual standards. Here, asking for input can help diffuse an unpleasant situation. When the client has an opportunity to complain to you directly, they’ll be less inclined to air their grievances publicly. Having an open discussion with an unhappy customer is far better than receiving negative reviews or getting tagged in reputation-damaging social media posts.

Since customer feedback is so valuable, it’s smart to take a proactive approach. Ideally, you should request feedback as part of the standard customer service process. This might involve asking clients to rate their experience at the end of each support call.

Many customer-focused tools give you the opportunity to request ratings automatically. A2 Hosting resellers have access to a range of these support portals, including Hesk:

Hesk has all the settings you need to request and log valuable feedback. This includes rating your self-help resources, which can be invaluable for continuously improving the quality of your blogs, tutorials, FAQs, and many other resources.

8. Be Proactive

Going the extra mile is one of the most effective ways to deliver five-star customer service for your reseller hosting business. Rather than simply reacting to customer requests, you should look for opportunities to anticipate your customers’ needs.

If you’re already gathering feedback, you’re off to a strong start. By looking for recurring elements and patterns in responses, you may be able to identify a product, service, or new feature that would improve the customer experience.

It’s also a smart idea to look for chances to communicate with your customers. Social media is a great place to start, but you can also interact in the comments section of your company blogs. Here, you may be able to encourage customer engagement by installing dedicated commenting software, such as Commentics:

This solution can provide a more fluid and responsive User Experience (UX), even when your comments section spans hundreds of posts. Another option is to interact with your customers via questionnaires. If you’re an A2 Hosting customer, Softalcous provides a wide range of polling and questionnaire software. Some popular choices include LimeSurvey, Advanced Poll, and LittlePoll.

Conclusion

Keeping your customers happy isn’t always easy, but it’s essential for running a successful reseller hosting business. Satisfied clients won’t hesitate to renew their hosting contracts, and they may even help you earn new customers by recommending you to their friends and family.

To deliver five-star customer support, we recommend using a variety of channels. For the best results, this should include immediate channels, such as telephone support, and those with a more forgiving timeline, such as ticket-based systems. It’s also a smart idea to offer self-help resources for customers who prefer to research a topic themselves.

Support is just one element of providing a positive customer experience. The quality of the hosting service you provide can make the difference between happy clients and angry phone calls to your customer support staff. To ensure that you’re providing the best possible customer service, we recommend purchasing your hosting from a provider who offers high-performance and an uptime guarantee. Check out our plans today!

Related Resources

How to Build a Vetter Reseller Website with Google Site Kit (5 Tips) 

11 Things to Look For in a Reseller Hosting Package

How to Make Money with Reseller Hosting

How to Make Your Reseller Hosting Business a Success 

Image credits: Pexels.

The post How to Deliver Five-Star Reseller Hosting Customer Support (8 Tips) appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Fortunately, Google Site Kit can help. This popular plugin displays key Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and Search Console data inside your WordPress dashboard. You can also use it to integrate additional Google services, including AdSense and Tag Manager, without having to edit your website’s code.

In this article, we’ll show you how to connect all of your favorite Google services to your reseller hosting website, to ensure easy access to all the data and features you need. Let’s get started!

An Introduction to Google Site Kit

Site Kit, Google’s official WordPress plugin, lets you connect and manage its suite of performance and analytics tools from your WordPress dashboard:

This includes Google Analytics, one of the most popular platforms for tracking and measuring web traffic. Today, countless business owners use it to analyze key metrics for their websites, such as session duration, pages per session, and bounce rate.

Google Site Kit also supports the AdSense platform, which you can use to generate revenue via mobile-responsive adverts that Google places on your website. To maximize your advertising earnings, Google tailors the adverts based on factors such as the visitor’s geographical location.

You can use Site Kit to access the Search Console directly from your WordPress account. This helps you track your site’s traffic and performance without having to access an external dashboard. In addition, you can use Search Console to optimize your content and increase your chances of appearing in relevant Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Site Kit also integrates with PageSpeed Insights (PSI). Unlike some competing analytics tools, PSI provides both lab and field data to deliver valuable insights into your site’s performance across both desktop and mobile devices:

A major advantage of Site Kit is that you can use it to connect to tools such as Tag Manager and Google Optimize, without manually adding code to your site’s header or footer. Note that you’ll still need to configure your tags and create your A/B tests in each tool’s dedicated dashboard.

Why You Might Want to Use Google Site Kit

As a hosting reseller, you’ll typically generate the majority of your sales from your website. This means that creating a high-performing, search-engine-friendly site is essential to the success of your business.

Google provides a wide range of services that can help you monitor and improve many aspects of your website, including analyzing changes in your site’s traffic, speed, and conversion rates. However, implementing and managing each of these services can be a time-consuming and frustrating process.

The Site Kit plugin aims to solve this problem by helping you integrate popular Google tools with your WordPress website. Then you can leverage and manage the services directly from your WordPress dashboard.

By making this information accessible from your admin area, Site Kit can help you keep a close eye on your site’s performance. The plugin can make it easier for you to identify and resolve problems as soon as they occur – and before they start negatively impacting your hosting sales and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

While you’re monitoring your site’s overall performance, you’ll also be in a solid position to identify opportunities for improvement. By continuously refining your reseller hosting site, you can maximize your chances of securing new customers and growing your hosting business.

The sheer accessibility of this data is also great news if you run your reseller hosting business as part of a team. Even if you’re familiar with all of the tools and platforms, there’s no guarantee your co-workers will be Google experts. Using the Site Kit plugin, you can ensure that all of your team members have access to the data they need to make important decisions regarding your reseller hosting business.

How to Add Google Site Kit to Your Website

You can install and activate the Google Site Kit plugin from your WordPress dashboard. However, if you’re using a caching plugin, there’s a chance you may encounter a warning when you try to activate Site Kit.

If you come across this warning, we recommend temporarily deactivating your caching plugin. Then you can reactivate it as soon as you’ve finished setting up Google Site Kit.

To add Site Kit to your website, you can navigate to Plugins > Add New, and then search for it. Click on the Install Now button, followed by Activate.

Next, to configure the Google plugin, you can click on Start Setup:

If you’ve navigated away from the setup screen and cannot currently see the above message, you can browse to Site Kit > Dashboard > Sign In With Google:

You can verify that you’re the website owner by logging into your Google account. When prompted, grant Site Kit permission to access your Search Console data and manage the list of sites and domains you control.

Next, Site Kit needs to add a verification token to your site’s Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) code. When prompted, click on Proceed > Allow.

As we’ve mentioned, the Site Kit plugin supports a range of Google services that you can add to your website. Most of them are optional.

However, Site Kit does require you to integrate Search Console with your WordPress site. If you haven’t previously connected to the Search Console, you’ll be asked to complete this step now. After the Search Console integration, you can select Go to my Dashboard:

Now you can monitor your Google Search Console data directly from your WordPress dashboard by navigating to Site Kit > Search Console. Note that it may take Site Kit some time to gather enough data to populate the WordPress dashboard, so you may not see an action-packed dashboard straight away.

How to Build a Better Reseller Website With Google Site Kit (5 Tips)

At this point, you can manage Google Search Console directly from your WordPress dashboard. However, you can also access a range of additional Google services.

To see what’s available, navigate to Site Kit > Settings > Connect More Services. From here, you can enable any of the services in the list. Let’s take a closer look!

1. Monitor Your Website Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics can help you understand what your visitors are doing and why. You can use that data to make smart decisions about the future of your reseller hosting business. Without access to an analytics platform, you run the risk of making critical business choices based on assumptions – rather than actual data.

Google Analytics provides insight into your website’s performance, including your traffic. As a hosting reseller, more traffic means more potential sales and greater revenue.

You can use Google Analytics to monitor and evaluate your traffic over time and identify what is or isn’t working. Then you can adjust your plans accordingly. Adapting is the key to growing your traffic and, ultimately, driving conversions.

Google Analytics also lets you assess how long visitors are spending on your reseller hosting website. Choosing a hosting provider is a huge decision for any business. If visitors are spending a significant amount of time on your site, it suggests that they’re engaged with your content, and may even consider making a purchase.

To add Google Analytics to your WordPress dashboard, select Set Up Analytics. Then you can enter your Google account details and grant the requested permissions.

At this point, you’ll have the option to use a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property with Site Kit. Alternatively, you can select an existing Google Analytics property, or create a new one in the WordPress dashboard:

When you’re happy with your selection, click on Configure Analytics. You can access your analytics at any time by navigating to Site Kit > Dashboard > Analytics.

2. Use PageSpeed Insights to Test Your Mobile and Desktop Performance

As a hosting reseller, your website’s performance has the potential to drive conversions or alienate potential customers. Google has confirmed that it uses page speed as a ranking factor. By continuously improving your site’s performance, you can often significantly boost your SEO.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of search engine rankings for your reseller hosting business. Studies show that 39 percent of online purchases are influenced by a relevant search.

Plus, over 40 percent of online revenue can be attributed to organic traffic. By using PSI to monitor and optimize your site’s performance continuously, you can climb those all-important search rankings, increase your traffic, and, hopefully, maximize your sales.

To configure PSI, simply select Set up PageSpeed Insights from the Site Kit settings screen, and the plugin will activate the PSI platform. You can view your data by navigating to Site Kit > Dashboard, and then scrolling to the bottom of the page:

You can also use the tabs to toggle between PSI’s field and lab data. Field data is based on your website’s historical performance. Meanwhile, the lab data is based on the simulated load on a single device and a fixed set of network conditions. These data sets will often differ, so we recommend comparing and contrasting the information in both tabs.

Since the number of people who browse the internet via mobile devices is on the rise, we also suggest monitoring both the desktop and mobile data. You can switch between PSI’s desktop and mobile reports using the icons located in the upper-right corner of this section.

PSI’s mobile section displays how your website performs under a mobile connection. Naturally, the desktop tab highlights your website’s performance on a desktop computer.

3. Perform A/B Testing With Google Optimize

You can measure the success of past activities using tools such as Google Analytics. This provides valuable information that you can apply to your future activities.

However, A/B testing can help you take a more proactive approach by creating variations of your upcoming content. Then you can test how well these variations perform using a limited audience.

For example, you might build alternative landing pages for a new hosting promotion. Using A/B testing, you could identify which version drives the most conversions.

You can create and test variations using Google’s Optimize service. Optimize is different than the integrations we’ve explored in the above sections. Even after configuring the connection with your WordPress site, you’ll still create and manage your tests in the Optimize dashboard:

However, Site Kit does make it easier to add the Optimize scripts to your website. It also enables you to monitor your tests directly from the WordPress dashboard.

To enable Google Optimize, you’ll need to create an Optimize account. After logging into your account, select the Settings icon. This launches a panel that displays your container ID. Please make a note of this information, as you’ll be using it to complete the integration:

Back in the WordPress dashboard, click on Set up Optimize. When prompted, you can enter your container ID and click on Configure Optimize:

Once Optimize is connected to your website via Google Site Kit, you can create tests using the external Optimize console. To run a simple test, switch over to the Optimize dashboard and select Let’s Go. You can choose the type of test that you want to start:

Next, enter the URL that you want to test, and Optimize will guide you through the process of building it. Once this test is up and running, it’ll appear in your WordPress dashboard.

4. Implement Powerful Event and Visitor Tracking With Tag Manager

You can use Tag Manager to add tracking codes to your website without having to write any code. This enables you to customize the data that’s sent to Google Analytics. By creating tags, you can monitor the specific metrics and events that you care about, even if Analytics doesn’t track them out-of-the-box.

Similar to Optimize, you’ll still need to create and manage your tags in the external Tag Manager dashboard. However, Site Kit does streamline the process of adding Tag Manager to your website.

To get started, navigate to Site Kit > Settings > Connect More Services from your WordPress dashboard. Next, select Set up Tag Manager:

When prompted, you can grant Site Kit access to your Google Tag Manager account and components. You can also create a new container to use with your website by selecting Set up a new container:

If you haven’t registered with Tag Manager, Site Kit will walk you through the account and container creation process. To connect Google Site Kit to your Tag Manager account, you can click on Re-fetch account.

WordPress should now display the account and container that you just created. Next, go ahead and click on Confirm & Continue.

At this point, Tag Manager is connected to your WordPress website. However, you’ll still create and manage all your tags in the Tag Manager dashboard.

In the Tag Manager dashboard, you can create your first tag by clicking on Add a new tag. In the subsequent panel, give this tag a name. Then you can select anywhere in the Tag Configuration box and choose the type of tag that you want to create:

Next, click on the Triggering box. Here, you can choose the event that this tag should record:

Now you can follow the onscreen instructions to build your tag. When you’re ready to go live with your tag, click on Save > Publish.

5. Consider Using AdSense as an Additional Revenue Stream

As a reseller hosting company, your main revenue source will likely be providing fast and reliable web hosting services to your customers. However, it’s a smart idea to look for opportunities to diversify your income. This helps to protect your business against fluctuations in the market, including periods where you may be generating lower-than-average revenue.

Now that you’re using Site Kit to drive more people to your website, it makes sense to monetize the additional traffic. One option is to enroll your site in an advertising network.

Site Kit has full support for the Google AdSense platform. Therefore, you can use the plugin to quickly and easily place AdSense code on every page of your website.

Site Kit will automatically determine the ideal size, type, and placement for each advert on every page of your site. This can help you generate revenue without negatively impacting the visitor experience.

To enable AdSense integration, you can select Set up AdSense from your WordPress dashboard. When prompted, grant Site Kit the requested permissions.

If you don’t already have a Google AdSense account, Site Kit will guide you through the account creation process. If you do have an AdSense account, you can follow the onscreen instructions to connect your account to the Site Kit plugin.

After you’ve integrated Site Kit with your Google AdSense account, you’ll need to wait for Google to approve your website. Once it does, Google will start displaying advertisements on your site – and you can start collecting advertiser revenue!

Conclusion

Adding a suite of Google services to your website can be a time-consuming task. Thankfully, the Google Site Kit plugin will handle much of the heavy lifting for you. After installing this plugin, you’ll have access to a range of powerful Google services that you can use to improve your reseller hosting website.

In this post, we discussed five ways you can use Site Kit to enhance your site:

1. Monitor your Google Analytics.
2. Use PageSpeed Insights (PSI) to test your mobile and desktop performance.
3. Conduct A/B testing with Google Optimize.
4. Implement powerful event and visitor tracking with Tag Manager.
5. Consider using Google AdSense as an additional revenue stream.

The Google Site Kit plugin can help you attract more traffic to your reseller website. However, the quality of your hosting packages is key to converting that extra traffic into loyal customers. To help maximize your conversions, we recommend offering web hosting that’s secure, reliable, and up to 20x faster than competing hosting solutions. Check out our reseller hosting plans to learn more!

Photo credits: Pexels.

The post How to Build a Better Reseller Website With Google Site Kit (5 Tips) appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Thankfully, with the right marketing, you can connect with a vast potential audience and rapidly grow your customer base. By following some straightforward marketing techniques, you can get your reseller hosting business off to a strong start and give your new venture the best possible chance of success.

In this article, we’ll share a whopping 13 ways to market your web hosting business. We’ll cover everything from social media to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), email campaigns, and branding. Let’s get started!

What Reseller Hosting Is (And Why You Might Want to Become a Reseller)

As a hosting reseller, you purchase a hosting package from an established provider. You pay a fixed fee for this server space, and then resell these services for a profit.

For an established business, reseller hosting can be a valuable way to diversify your income. This kind of diversification can help protect your business against fluctuations in the market.

It can also be a way to sell more to your current customers. Most modern businesses require web hosting. This means that if you have an existing customer base, you’ll likely already have an audience for your hosting services.

If someone requires web hosting, they’ll likely feel more comfortable opting for a company that they have an existing relationship with, rather than taking a gamble on an unknown third party. By offering hosting services to your clients, you can remove their fear of the unknown, and provide a better customer experience.

Additionally, purchasing hosting from an established provider can help eliminate many of the costs associated with launching a new service, or even starting an entirely new business. This makes reseller hosting a good fit for startups and small businesses, which typically work on tighter budgets.

Once your reseller hosting business is up and running, you can also save on operating costs. It’s your provider’s responsibility to maintain its servers and update or replace its equipment as required. In this way, you can benefit from efficient, up-to-date software and hardware, without having to pay any of the associated maintenance fees.

Why It’s Important to Market Your Web Hosting Business

Marketing is a huge part of any business, regardless of size or industry. If you’re going to attract new customers, they need to know what you have to offer. Marketing can help you reach these consumers and educate them about your products and services.

The customer journey often starts far before the first purchase. Through consistent marketing, you can build a relationship with your future shoppers. This often involves publishing helpful, insightful content such as blog posts or video tutorials. Marketing might also involve engaging directly with potential customers. For example, you might respond to questions they post on social media or community forums.

Marketing your business is also key to building and maintaining your company’s reputation. By continuously publishing useful content and engaging with your target audience in a helpful, positive way, you can create a great first impression. This can increase your appeal to potential customers and give you an edge over the competition.

While it’s tempting to focus on new audiences, marketing can help you retain your existing customer base. Just because someone has previously made a purchase with your company doesn’t automatically mean they’ll remain loyal forever.

By continuously communicating with your clients, you’ll remain at the forefront of their minds, which encourages brand loyalty. You can also ensure that your customers are aware of your latest products and services, as well as any events you’re running such as sales and discounts.

13 Ways to Market Your Web Hosting Business

Marketing is an important tool for attracting new customers and growing your business. An effective marketing strategy is essential for running a successful web hosting company, so let’s help you spread the word! Here are 13 ways to market your web hosting business.

1. Identify What Makes Your Business Unique

A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is a statement that helps distinguish your brand, products, or services from the competition. By creating an effective USP, you can clearly communicate the tangible reasons a potential customer should choose your business over your closest competitors.

For the best results, you should focus on identifying measurable benefits that are meaningful to your target audience. For example, a USP might be the fact that you’re over 50 percent cheaper than your competitors, or that you offer a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.

Get the USP right, and you’ll instantly increase your appeal to new customers and drive sales. By identifying it early, you ensure that it features throughout your marketing activities, which will help you create a more persuasive and coherent marketing strategy.

2. Decide on Your Target Audience

To market your web hosting business successfully, you need to know exactly who you’re marketing to. By identifying your ideal customer, you ensure that all your marketing activities are focused on that specific customer. This might involve using certain keywords, optimizing your blog content to drive conversions, or running targeted ads.

Many successful hosting resellers target a niche audience, such as restaurants in your local area, remote workers, or pet sitters looking to create their first website. By focusing on a specific audience, you can market your web hosting business in a way that speaks to the deep needs of your chosen niche.

When deciding who to target, it’s important to find a niche that’s large enough to sustain your business. Here, it may help to use a tool such as Google Trends:

As a niche hosting provider, your potential revenue may be smaller. However, you’re not struggling to be heard above the big hosting companies. This means your marketing costs should be lower – and that’s great news for your Return On Investment (ROI)!

3. Create a Strong Brand

Branding is the process of establishing a clear, consistent company identity that sets you apart from the competition. With careful branding, your marketing can make a more memorable impression on your target audience. This can sometimes motivate the potential customer to explore your products and services immediately.

In other scenarios, the consumer might not have an immediate need for your offerings. However, by making a memorable first impression, you can increase the chances of them revisiting your company when they do have a need.

Consistent, clear branding also puts the customer at ease by continuously reinforcing what they can expect from your business. To achieve this consistency, it’s important that all your products and services reflect your company branding. As a hosting reseller, this includes the tools that customers use to access your services.

At A2 Hosting, we provide extensive white-labeling functionality. As a hosting reseller, you can use these tools to re-brand all of our A2 Hosting products and services:

It’s also important to note that some people have negative misconceptions regarding resellers. By creating a strong, coherent brand, you can obscure your identity as a hosting reseller – and let the quality of your products, services, and marketing speak for themselves.

4. Do Your (Keyword) Research

Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that your target audience are searching for. These keywords can then form the basis of your marketing activities, particularly your targeted advertisements and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.

Ideally, you should search for keywords that strongly relate to your business and target audience, but have very low competition. This can help keep your marketing costs low, and deliver a healthy ROI. You can perform keyword research using a tool such as Google AdWords.

Although Google Ads is one of the most popular advertising platforms, there are other platforms you may want to consider as well. With over 1.69 billion Facebook users worldwide in 2019, we recommend checking out the Facebook Ads platform:

In addition to providing access to a huge audience, this platform offers the Facebook Pixel. This is a small bit of code that can track everyone who visits your website. The pixel can help you understand your target audience. It will even show you users with similar habits and interests, which can be invaluable for your future marketing activities.

5. Research Your Competitors

Reseller hosting is a competitive industry. However, this means you’ll have plenty of opportunities to learn from similar businesses by conducting competitor research.

Competitor research is where you analyze similar businesses’ marketing activities. You can then reverse-engineer any successful strategies for use in your own reseller hosting. It can also involve SEO espionage.

You may want to research the terms that your competitors are ranking highly for, a tactic sometimes referred to as ‘keyword gap analysis’. If these keywords were previously featured in a paid ad, you can even view the amount of traffic generated from that promotion. This can help you identify high-converting terms that you can use in your own advertisements.

6. Create Compelling Calls To Action (CTAs)

A Call To Action (CTA) prompts the customer to perform a desired action. Some common CTAs include purchasing a product, getting more information about a special offer, or subscribing to your newsletter. They often take the form of buttons or links.

An effective CTA helps the customer progress to the next stage of the buyer’s journey or sales funnel, which increases your chances of securing a successful sale. To create a killer CTA, we recommend starting with a strong command verb. Depending on the desired outcome, popular examples include buy, shop, subscribe, or download.

Powerful CTAs also communicate the value customers will get from performing the desired action. Here, it may help to use words that provoke a strong emotional response in your audience, potentially by leveraging the customer’s Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).

7. Boost your SEO

SEO is the process of improving your site’s position and search engine visibility. By climbing the search engine rankings, you can often boost your site’s organic traffic.

The first page of Google receives 95 percent of web traffic, and the first five organic search results get over two-thirds of all clicks. This makes SEO an effective way to grow your audience and increase your sales.

According to an eye-tracking study, up to 80 percent of people ignore paid search results in favor of organic options. This means that SEO is an effective way to get ahead of the competition, even when your competitors have larger marketing budgets.

There are several tried-and-tested ways to boost your search engine rankings. This includes formatting your blog pages so they’re more appealing to search engine bots. We also recommend creating a strong, search-optimized URL format for your reseller hosting website.

8. Run a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is the process of promoting your business, products, and services via email. This might include your company newsletter, notifications about upcoming sales, and even discount codes that you email to your best customers.

Email can be an excellent way to reach your target audience. In fact, it’s estimated that the number of email users in the U.S. will reach 255 million by the end of 2020.

Your ideal customer is probably spending a lot of time in their inbox. According to the 2019 Adobe Email Usage Study, Americans spend over three hours per day checking their work email, and over two hours checking their personal email. That’s five hours every single day, where you could market your web hosting business.

Experts predict that 333 billion marketing emails will be sent out daily by 2022. To help your emails stand out from the crowd, it’s important to craft a strong, engaging subject line for each one. It’s also a good idea to embed high-resolution images, and personalize your marketing emails wherever possible.

9. Promote Your Website on Social Media

Social media marketing is the process of using social media platforms to connect with your target audience. You can use these channels to build your brand and promote your products and services.

Social media is particularly important for building long-term relationships with your customers. Interacting with your audience can encourage brand loyalty. They’ll be more likely to renew their hosting contracts, rather than defecting to your competitors.

An active social media presence can also contribute positively towards your company’s reputation. Many buyers search for a company’s name before making a purchasing decision. If they see evidence of you interacting positively with customers on social media, they’ll likely feel more confident that you’re a legitimate and trustworthy business.

An active and friendly social media presence can also present your company as available and reachable. This will reassure potential customers that you’ll be on-hand to resolve any questions or complaints they may have. This should encourage them to choose you as your hosting provider.

10. Market your Web Hosting Business to a Global Audience

As an online business, you have the opportunity to market to a global audience. If you’re going to promote your reseller hosting services to international customers, it helps to speak their language.

According to estimates, 60 percent of all online content is in English. By creating multilingual marketing content, you can immediately get ahead of the competition and connect with the 74 percent of internet users who speak a language other than English.

There’s a chance that your target audience may be multilingual. However, there’s still evidence to suggest that your typical internet user appreciates a company trying to communicate in their native tongue. According to research, 65 percent of consumers prefer to access content in their native language. By localizing your marketing content, you can increase your appeal to a global audience, and potentially sway them to choose your hosting services over all the competition.

To ensure that your localization is a success, it’s important to opt for native translators over automated translators. We also recommend using labels rather than flags in your language switcher. The way French is spoken in Paris differs from the way people speak the language in Madagascar, Canada, or Haiti. This means that flags aren’t always the best way to represent a language.

11. Try Webinar Marketing

Webinars may not immediately spring to mind as a way to market your web hosting business. However, they can present an opportunity to connect with a new audience and promote your reseller hosting business.

For the best results, your webinars should provide real value to participants, in addition to promoting your services. For example, you might discuss trends, best practices, or advice on how to launch a successful website. This would be beneficial to your target audience, while also providing plenty of opportunities to mention your hosting services.

By sharing useful and insightful advice, you can also showcase your expertise. This can make participants perceive you as an expert in your field. It can also contribute to your reputation as a helpful business that’s always looking to provide value to your target audience, rather than simply promoting your products and services.

12. Excel at Customer Support

Your typical customer is far more likely to trust a recommendation from a friend, family member, or colleague, when compared to any other form of marketing. This means that a satisfied customer can become a powerful way to market your web hosting business.

There are many factors that contribute towards a positive customer experience. However, the quality of your customer support is very important. Ideally, customers will be able to contact you via multiple channels.

Customers who have urgent, business-critical queries will appreciate immediate forms of support, such as telephone or live chat. Other customers will be happier researching answers themselves, via a resource such as a knowledge base or wiki:

If you’re an A2 Hosting reseller, you can display information about how to contact support as part of the customer’s cPanel account. This ensures that your customers know exactly where to turn if they ever encounter an issue.

By providing stellar customer support, you can transform your customers into your most powerful marketers. If you manage to secure this kind of persuasive, word-of-mouth marketing, you may experience a significant increase in sales.

13. Make It Easy for Customers to Leave 5-Star Reviews

Many consumers trust real-user reviews. Studies suggest that 90 percent of consumers decide whether to do business with a particular company after reading up to ten user reviews. This means that positive reviews are vital for running a successful reseller hosting business.

Do you want more positive reviews? Often, all you need to do is ask! If you ask a customer directly, research suggests that over 50 percent of them will be willing to share their opinions.

You can also encourage customer reviews using a marketing funnel plugin that’s tailored towards reviews. The popular Starfish Reviews plugin enables you to design a landing page that prompts satisfied customers to leave reviews:

You can also use this plugin to collect private feedback. This can be useful for improving your reseller hosting services, which can contribute positively towards your future customer reviews.

Conclusion

Reseller hosting is a highly competitive industry. However, an effective marketing strategy can set your business up for success, no matter how strong the competition.

To help you connect with as many potential customers as possible, we recommend starting with the essentials. This means identifying what makes your business unique. As a reseller, your business is completely defined by your hosting provider. Wherever possible, we recommend opting for a provider that offers highly-marketable features, such as a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.

After ensuring that your business has a strong foundation, you can launch a multimedia marketing plan. This might consist of everything from email campaigns to webinars and compelling Calls To Action (CTAs)!

Image credits: Pexels.

The post 13 Ways to Market Your Web Hosting Business appeared first on The A2 Posting.

Fortunately, there are solid, practical steps you can take to ensure that you deliver a successful client website. By planning each step of the process, you can guide your client through the project and deliver a website that meets (or exceeds) their expectations.

In this article, we’ll show you how to build a successful website for your client in eight practical steps. We’ll break down each phase, and include some helpful tips and essential questions to ask along the way. Let’s get started!

1. Get to Know the Client and Ascertain Their Website Goals

This step is primarily about extracting information from the client and listening for their needs. Some clients may not be sure what their exact requirements are, so it’s helpful to ask exploratory questions when they seem unclear or their proposed direction lacks an understanding of website design or technology.

Your goal in this step is to gather and clarify information. Later, you’ll have an opportunity to propose a solution and pitch your ideas and services. First, however, it’s important to be diligent to define their needs by asking lots of questions.

You may want to develop a pre-development questionnaire or client intake form that you can use as part of your process. Some questions to consider include:

• What do they do?
• How do they do it differently than their competitors?
• What do they value?
• How do they define their brand?
• Do they have brand assets already created? A brand guideline?
• Where is their business headed in the near future, and in years to come? How do these goals impact their website?
• Why are they getting a website or redesigning their website now?
• What do they want their website to accomplish?
• Do they have any “musts” for their website?
• What is the time frame to complete the project?
• Do they have a domain name already? Web hosting? (You will need access to their website hosting account and possibly their domain registrar.)
• How do they want to integrate social media, and which platforms?
• Do they require email integrations?
• Are there other forms they may need?
• What about ongoing site maintenance? Will someone on their team take care of this, or are they open to a monthly or hourly contract with you for ongoing maintenance?
• Who will be the project point of contact and decision maker?
• Do they have a preference for which website platform they want to use?

Be sure to listen for important details and take notes. You can then ask follow-up questions in areas where you need clarification.

Near the end of the meeting, take a moment to review your notes and recap the most important information, to make sure you haven’t missed points that are important to the client. They may assume that you already know certain details, or that they’ve implied these points during the conversation.

You’ll cover a lot of ground in this meeting, so don’t feel pressured to offer immediate solutions or numbers. Instead, let the client know what the next steps are – you will review their project requirements and provide them with a scope of work document.

2. Choose a Platform to Build the Website On

A website’s platform can impact several aspects of the project, including hosting, pricing, functionality, and timeline. It’s important to decide on a platform early in the process, as it is the foundation of what you’ll be building.

Your client’s website will require a Content Management Solution (CMS), and there are several options available. Each has its own benefits. Once you understand your client’s needs, you can decide which CMS will get the job done.

Here are a few leading CMS solutions:

WordPress

WordPress is free and open source, with lots of plugins to extend your site’s functionality. It’s easy to learn and easy to use, with a large and engaged community of support. It’s also secure and inexpensive, and upgrading to newer versions is simple.

Drupal

Drupal is another free and open-source option, with lots of modules for customization. It was created for developers, so it requires advanced knowledge. Drupal excels if you need to control site access and permissions, and multilingual functionality is part of its core (so you won’t need to rely on a plugin). Project costs and maintenance are usually higher than with other CMSs. Upgrading to newer versions is also more complex.

Joomla

Like the previous two options, Joomla is free and open source, with lots of modules providing flexibility. As for complexity, Joomla is not as easy to learn as WordPress, but requires less expertise than Drupal. It offers more options for user access than WordPress, and you can use different templates for different areas on the site (whereas WordPress limits you to one theme).

Shopify

Finally, Shopify is a hosted ecommerce platform for online retailers. It’s easy to use, but lacks some flexibility, with fewer customization options. Shopify requires a monthly subscription starting at $29 per month. Note that you can also implement Shopify (and other ecommerce solutions) as a plugin or module when using another CMS, such as WordPress or Drupal.

Other considerations when choosing a CMS include:

• Your experience. Which CMS solutions have you used for site development in the past, and how extensive is your experience with each?
• Your client’s preferences. They may have employees with experience on certain platforms, or perhaps a business associate has recommended a particular CMS.
• The project needs. Which CMS will best suit the requirements of the website?
• Don’t forget to consider scalability for future website development and business expansion.

When choosing a CMS, make sure you build your site on a secure, stable platform that provides ongoing support for the future. It’s important to select the option that will provide the best outcome for each unique project, meeting your clients’ needs, and aligning with your expertise.

3. Write Up the Proposal and Determine the Scope of the Project

Once you’ve gathered all the information for the project, it’s time to put a project proposal together. This document will explicitly identify the deliverables and terms, including project costs. This is your opportunity to show the client that you’ve been listening, and you can deliver.

It’s important to include enough information to cover the essentials. You can go into more detail in the scope of work or contract. There, you’ll want to state the client’s project requirements and your proposed solution, including a project cost. It’s fine to sell your idea as the solution, but be open for renegotiating or revising as per the client’s feedback.

Once the proposal is approved, you can use it to generate a more detailed scope of work that explicitly states the project in full. This document will direct your work and your relationship with the client. It will serve to clearly state what everyone should expect.

A solid scope of work can spare you lots of stress, time, and money throughout the life of the project. Elements to address include:

• Website scale. Will this be a 10-page website, or an ecommerce site with 35 products to sell?
• Timing. What is the timeline? Does your client have a hard launch date they need to meet? Are there stages within that process?
• Process. Include workflow and approvals. What will their approval process look like?
• Assets. Which assets will they provide, and which will you need to obtain or create on their behalf?
• Access. How will you get site assets and access permissions?
• Contact. Who will be your point of contact, and are they the decision maker?
• Platform. Which CMS will be used to build the site?
• Integrations. Determine any plugins or additional functionality required to achieve the project objectives. Will they require integrations (or ongoing services) the client will be billed for by a third party?
• Accessibility. Define what accessibility functionality will be built into the website.
• Backups. Will you include a plugin to run automatically? Be sure your client has a plan for site backups.
• Security. Include an SSL certificate, and define what security measures you will implement. Be sure to research security protocols for industry standards in advance. For example, if you are building a website where Protected Health Information (PHI) is collected (such as for a medical client), make sure you’re using HIPAA compliant forms and recommended security measures.

Once you’ve agreed on the scope of work, it’s good practice to draw up a formal contract that both parties can sign. This protects both you and the client. Even if your project is small, it’s vital to clearly specify who is responsible for what. To streamline your process, you can also create templates for key documents, including your intake form, proposal, scope of work, and contract.

4. Develop a Sitemap and Visual Layout (Wireframe)

Every good design starts with a blueprint. During this phase, you’ll want to define the flow and user experience of the website with a sitemap and wireframes.

You can use online tools such as Octopus.do for building sitemaps:

Optionally, you can use a computer application such as Sketch for wireframes:

You can also use paper and pencil to sketch out these visuals – anything works as long as it gets the job done.

Don’t be afraid to take some time to complete this step. It’s much easier to redraw an element than have to redesign a website page (or ten). Along with the sitemap and page layout, at this stage you’ll want to determine the overall look and style of the site, including its:

• Colors
• Typography
• Images
• Visual hierarchy

You may want to create a style tile, to help your client visualize the website’s concept. These can also save time by ensuring that the client is in agreement with the overall look and feel. Otherwise, you may have to revise your style sheets later in the design process.

Remember to refer to your scope of work often during this phase, to make sure you’re covering all of the stipulated points. If issues arise that are integral to the project, you can express your concerns to the client immediately and schedule a meeting to evaluate and decide on the best course forward. Any tasks outside the scope of work should be signed off on by the client.

5. Collect or Create Your Website’s Content

By this point you should have a clearly-defined content plan, know who is responsible for delivering the content, and understand how that will flow throughout the website. At this step, you should be sure that everything is ready to deploy, and that you have sufficient resources for each website page you’ll build.

You can start by collecting page content elements – such as copy, Calls to Action (CTAs), videos, links, and images. Review any website content provided by the client, and suggest any areas where it might require optimization. Helpful tools like Google Docs or Dropbox can help facilitate information sharing.

For example, your client may not understand the importance of keywords or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so you might consider providing some quality keywords to guide their content creation. Part of the project’s success – especially in the long run – will depend on having targeted content that delivers results.

Some tools to consider include Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends:

You can share these with your client as a means to help them continue creating search-optimized content.

6. Design the Website and Test It

This stage is especially fun, as it brings your hard work to life. When designing your pages, consider their content first. You can ask yourself questions such as:

• What is the purpose of the page? This should be a priority throughout the design process.
• What action should the user take when visiting this page? Make sure the CTA is clear and compelling.

You can create and use page templates to maintain consistency throughout the website and speed up your process. Make sure to adhere to your agreed-upon styles and visual elements during the design phase. This should be about the implementation of the predetermined design concept, not about creating something altogether new.

As the website takes on form, it’s especially important to provide opportunities for client feedback. Sometimes it is difficult for clients to envision how the website will look and flow, so when they do see it, they may have some objections or questions.

This can be frustrating to both you and the client. So it’s helpful to determine specifics about design revisions in advance: i.e., at what point will the client provide feedback, and how many revisions will be included in the cost? Including this information in the scope of work also helps to normalize the process of revisions, so no one is caught off guard when changes are needed.

Once the site’s design is finalized, you can perform a pre-launch checklist that might include:

• Checking copy for typos.
• Verifying that all links and buttons work properly.
• Testing all forms, and making sure notifications are routed to the correct team members.
• Testing online transactions and shopping cart functionality (if applicable).
• Checking the site on multiple devices and browsers for responsiveness and accessibility.

Once your checklist is complete, it’s time to launch!

7. Launch With Confidence

The technical aspects of this step will vary depending on how you developed the site. Whether you’ve used a local development environment or built the site on a server, it’s best to create a launch checklist for a worry-free deployment process.

When the site is ready, check the pages and links within to verify that everything is working properly. You may want to schedule the launch during the weekend, at night, or at another time when website traffic is low. Make sure you’ve cleared your calendar in advance, ensuring that you’ll be available for any problems or delays.

If problems do arise during the launch process, it’s vital to be proactive and resolve them as quickly and professionally as possible. It’s also a good idea to take note of any glitches or issues that arise during this phase. You can incorporate this knowledge into future pre-launch checklists.

You may also want to keep contact information for the web host on hand, as well as any other technical partners you’re working with. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re experiencing a problem. It’s rare that your issue is unique, and others have likely encountered similar issues and can share their insights to help guide you.

After you go live with the site, don’t forget to hand off any login credentials the client will need in order to access and update it. You may want to advise that they use a login user with limited permissions, however, especially until they get familiar with how the website works.

This is also an excellent opportunity to offer training services. You may want to include some free training in the project package, but you can also make extended training available as an add-on service.

8. Set Yourself Apart With Stellar Customer Service

You serve as a vital bridge between your client and the technical aspects of their website. Therefore, it’s smart to be proactive in offering support options. You may include free support for the first thirty days, or offer an add-on support package billed monthly (or annually for a discount).

Handing over the website to your client is similar to handing over the keys to a car. Keep in mind that your client may not know how to drive. At a minimum, they won’t be familiar with all the believable options, and a helpful walkthrough will facilitate a smooth transition.

Once your client is satisfied with their new website, this is the time to ask for a testimonial or review of your work. Remember to make this process as easy as possible for your client.

After that, you might consider scheduling a three-month, six-month, and annual check-in call with your client, even if you don’t have a maintenance agreement. These may present opportunities for future work, and keep you in mind for referrals. Plus, these calls will demonstrate your care and support, reflecting well on your business.

Conclusion

Building a successful client website is a complicated process, but the task can be simplified by breaking down each stage into well-thought-out steps. By following a few crucial stages, you can manage the project with professionalism and make it enjoyable for your client and yourself (or your team).

In this article, we shared eight steps for building a successful client website:

1. Get to know the client and ascertain their website goals.
2. Choose a platform to build the site on.
3. Define the scope of the project.
4. Develop a sitemap and visual layout.
5. Collect or create the website’s content.
6. Design the website and test it.
7. Launch with confidence.
8. Set yourself apart with stellar customer service.

Follow these steps and you’re on your way to a successful website launch. Of course, you’ll also need a top-quality web host!

The post How To Build Successful Websites For Your Clients (In 8 Steps) appeared first on The A2 Posting.

However, diversifying your income doesn’t have to be difficult. By becoming a hosting reseller, you can sell the services of an established, experienced web host, without any of the setup costs or maintenance headaches.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to become a hosting reseller, even if you have zero existing experience. We’ll walk you through the process of selecting a hosting provider, creating your hosting packages, and providing exceptional customer support. Finally, we’ll share some tips, tricks, and advice on how to promote your brand-new web hosting business. Let’s jump right in!

An Introduction to Reseller Hosting

For the uninitiated, reselling is the act of purchasing a product or service from a third-party, and selling the product or service on for a profit. As a hosting reseller, you’ll purchase a hosting package from a trusted, established hosting provider. You can then divide these hosting resources into a number of smaller accounts and sell them to customers.

Most of the time, your customers will be completely unaware that you’re a reseller. You’ll be their point of contact for everything from support queries, to upgrades, and payment. Note that you’re not conducting any shady practices here, or otherwise ‘hoodwinking’ the customer. You’re essentially ‘white-labelling’ a hosting provider’s services, and taking on some of the responsibility.

Overall, becoming a hosting reseller is a cost-effective, low-risk way to diversify your income that’s also easy to setup and maintain. We’ll talk more about how to launch your hosting reseller business soon, but first, let’s dig deeper into why you’d want to become a hosting reseller in the first place.

The Benefits of Reseller Hosting for Your Business

There are lots of reasons to start your own reselling business. Whether you’re an established business looking to cross-sell to your existing customers, or you’re eager to embark on a new business ensure, here are some of the benefits of reseller hosting.

You Can Diversify Your Income

Running a business is tough, and demand for your primary products and services may naturally wax and wane throughout the year. Other products may be occasional, or even one-off purchases. Even if you provide high-quality goods and exceptional customer service, no-one is going to purchase an unwanted replacement product.

Changes in market trends can also impact your bottom line. Just because your flagship product is flying off the shelves now doesn’t mean it’ll be in high demand forever.

If you let your business stagnate, you could easily wind up with less sales, clients, and a dwindling income. By diversifying your income, you can protect your business against market fluctuations, and remain competitive and profitable in today’s challenging economic climate.

You’re Able to Cross-Sell to Your Existing Customer Base

In today’s market, it’s difficult to think of an organization or business that doesn’t need a website. Whether it’s a local, independent boutique or a multinational corporation, every business can benefit from an online presence.

If you have an existing customer base, then you have a built-in audience for your reseller hosting business. By becoming a reseller, you can boost your income, without any of the time and effort typically associated with securing new customers.

You Can Provide a Better Experience to Your Existing Clients

The unknown can be scary. Most customers will feel happier purchasing from a company they have an existing relationship with, rather than taking a gamble on an unknown third party.

By offering web hosting services to your existing customers, you can maximize your revenue, while improving the customer experience – a win-win situation. If you already provide tech-focused products and services, you could even combine your offerings to create a convenient, all-in-one package that covers all your customers’ IT needs.

You’ll Likely Build Customer Loyalty

It’s difficult to build a business on one-off purchases. As a subscription-based model, reseller hosting can provide your business with a reliable, recurring income.

Reseller hosting can help you transform one-off or occasional purchases into loyal, repeat customers. Assuming that you keep your customers happy, each new hosting package sale could provide your business with recurring revenue for years to come.

You’ll Usually Avoid Setup Costs and Other Complexities

Starting a web hosting business from scratch requires a significant upfront investment. At a minimum, you’ll need to purchase servers and software licenses, and setup your own network.

By opting for reseller hosting, you immediately eliminate these startup costs. Simply purchase a hosting package from an established and trusted hosting provider, and you’re ready to start selling web hosting.

Maintenance Doesn’t Have to Be Your Responsibility

Servers require ongoing maintenance, including upgrades and replacement parts. You may even have to hire full-time staff who’ll be responsible for managing your server infrastructure.

If you opt for reseller hosting, your provider is responsible for monitoring and maintaining the server equipment. Not only can this save you a significant amount of time and effort, but it can also replace unpredictable costs with a set monthly or annual payment.

Even in the event of a catastrophic equipment failure, your hosting provider is solely responsible for getting their servers back up and running. No matter how expensive the repairs, you can continue paying your pre-agreed subscription fee, and raking in the profits.

There Are Opportunities for Expansion

In today’s competitive and challenging market, you can’t afford to stagnate. Once your hosting venture is delivering a steady income, there are lots of opportunities to expand your operations.

You might encourage new sign-ups by creating a web hosting affiliate program. Alternatively, you could add extra hosting-related services to your repertoire, such as reselling domain names, and become a one-stop-shop for all your customers.

How to Get Started as a Successful Hosting Reseller (In 7 Easy Steps)

Instead of spending more time talking about all the benefits of reseller hosting, let’s look at how to create, launch and run a web hosting business. Here’s our seven-step plan to becoming a successful hosting reseller!

Step 1: Choose Your Host

As a hosting reseller, your services are completely dictated by your hosting provider. Therefore, choosing the right provider for your reseller business is crucial. Get this step right, and you’re off to the best possible start. Get it wrong, and your new business venture could be facing an uphill battle.

When choosing a hosting provider, we’d recommend paying particular attention to uptime. This is the amount of time the provider’s servers have been up and running, and is usually expressed as a percentage.

If your hosting provider’s servers go down, it’ll take all of your customers’ websites down with it. For your customers, downtime means everything from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) penalties, missed sales, and loss of revenue.

For you as a hosting provider, downtime means one thing: unhappy customers. By choosing a hosting provider with a high uptime rate, you can maximize your chances of happy, repeat customers who’ll recommend your business to all their contacts.

Once you’ve checked the hosting provider’s uptime rates, you should investigate other factors such as whether the hosting provider prioritizes performance. You should also check their reputation amongst customers, including their rating on third party review sites such as Trustpilot.

When you have a network of customers relying on your hosting services, it’s also vital that you can contact your hosting provider 24/7. Ideally, your provider should be contactable via multiple channels, and provide self-help resources such as a detailed knowledge base and regularly-updated blog.

When choosing a hosting provider, there are many factors that you should take into consideration, but there’s one major deciding factor. You should only use a reseller provider who you’d trust to host your own website. After all, if you wouldn’t be happy to use a particular hosting provider, then why would your customers?

Step 2: Choose Your Hosting Package

It may be tempting to opt for a package that provides unlimited resources, including uncapped memory, bandwidth, and disk space. However, customers will be reluctant to pay for resources that they don’t actually need. To provide the best value for money, your chosen hosting package should reflect your customers’ needs as closely as possible.

When choosing a package, you should carefully examine the computational resources included, such as disk space. Wherever possible, you should opt for a Solid State Drive (SSD) as they offer excellent read-write speeds, especially compared to traditional mechanical hard disks. At A2 Hosting, all our reseller hosting packages provide SSD, ranging from 200 GB to a more budget-friendly 30 GB.

You should also try to gauge the amount of bandwidth your customers will require. This can vary depending on factors such as page size, and the amount of traffic their website typically receives. If you can’t accurately estimate the required bandwidth, then we’d recommend a provider that offers a range of bandwidths. Ideally, your chosen provider should also make it easy to upgrade to a higher bandwidth, if required.

The number of Central Processing Units (CPUs) is also an important factor. Just like your home computer, your provider’s server has multiple CPU cores. The bigger the CPU capacity, the more information the server can process before losing performance. To ensure a high level of performance, all our A2 Hosting reseller accounts have a 32 core server minimum, and two cores per cPanel user.

There are more factors to consider when choosing a reseller hosting package, but bear these points in mind and you’ll be off to a good start. For more information, always search your provider’s website for a detailed breakdown and comparison of all the hosting packages they offer.

Step 3: Create Your Customer Hosting Packages

Once you’ve purchased your reseller hosting, it’s time to divide those resources into packages, ready to sell to your customers. To maximize sales, it’s important that your pricing strategy reflects your target audience.

Factors such as resource allocation, the type of hardware and software licenses available, and the level of customer support you offer, should all influence your pricing strategy. This means that you should consider these factors carefully when creating your hosting packages. Ideally, your packages should offer all the resources and features your customers need, at a price that makes sense for them.

If you purchase an A2 Hosting reseller account, you can create packages using WebHost Manager (WHM). This is a dashboard that has almost everything you need to manage every part of your reseller business, including creating your hosting packages.

If you’re an A2 Hosting customer, you can access WHM by logging into the A2 Hosting client area. From here, you can choose your reseller hosting account, then select Login to WHM.

In the WHM console, select Add a Package. On the subsequent page, give your package a descriptive name and specify the resources that you want to include in this package, such as Disk Quota, Max Databases, and Max Addon Domains.

Once you’re happy with your hosting package, click Save. Rinse and repeat to create multiple hosting packages, such as the classic Bronze, Silver, and Gold pricing structure offered by many web hosting companies.

Step 4: Plan Your Support System

There are many different ways to offer customer support. Depending on your target audience, some methods may be more appealing than others.

An email or a ticket-based support system may be perfect for non-urgent queries. Customers with limited technical knowledge may also feel more comfortable communicating via text, as it removes the time pressure.

With emails and support tickets, the customer has plenty of time to consider their response. For the same reason, text-based support systems are often popular with customers who aren’t communicating in their preferred language.

Customers who are completely reliant on your web hosting will typically require more immediate support. If a customer’s business-critical website goes down, they’ll need to contact your support, now. These customers may prefer live chat or telephone support, rather than waiting for an email response.

If you’re an A2 Hosting reseller, your customers can contact your support agents directly from cPanel. Using WHM, you can add your support information and contact details to the customer’s cPanel account. Add this information, and your customers will know exactly where to turn if they ever encounter an issue.

Log into your WHM console, and select Customization > Public Contact. Here, you can enter all the information your customers need, in order to contact your support agents, or access your support services.

You may also want to provide self-help resources, such as tutorials, knowledge bases, and wikis. Self-help customer support is ideal for more tech-savvy customers who prefer to resolve problems themselves.

You can make these self-help resources accessible via the customer’s cPanel. Log into your WHM console, and select Customization > Customize Branding.

You can now add links to your self-help resources. These URLs will be displayed in the customer’s cPanel interface, similar to your customer support information.

Step 5. Define Your Terms of Service

Every host, including resellers, need to define their own Terms of Service. This agreement can prevent customers from abusing your products and services, and limits your liability. It also establishes ownership over your intellectual property, including content, trademarks, and copyright.

As a reseller, your Terms of Service must be in accordance with your hosting provider’s acceptable usage policies. You’ll find these terms on your hosting provider’s website.

If you’re unsure, you can contact your hosting provider for guidance. A good hosting provider should be willing to work with you, to ensure your Terms of Service are in line with their own policies.

After establishing your hosting provider’s wishes, you can start writing your Terms of Service. Alternatively, you can get a helping hand using a tool such as TermsFeed. You can use this tool to generate some Terms of Service boilerplate, and customize it based on your hosting provider’s requirements.

If you’d prefer to use a WordPress plugin, WP AutoTerms can generate a range of legal documents and policies. Using WP AutoTerms, you can create a Terms of Service agreement for your WordPress website, plus other important legal texts including a Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.

Step 6. Get Your Hosting Business Online

Next, you need a way to get your hosting packages in front of potential customers. Sometimes, web hosting is a natural extension of your current services. In this scenario, you may want to add landing pages to your existing WordPress website.

While you can create landing pages using WordPress’ built-in features, page builders give you more control over your landing page’s look, feel, and functionality. Elementor is one of the most popular page builder plugins, and provides everything you need to build beautifully-designed landing pages.

Alternatively, you can build an e-commerce store dedicated to your web hosting business, using the popular WooCommerce platform. This gives you the ability to build a professional-looking e-commerce site within WordPress. This platform also integrates with popular payment gateways, so you can accept payments via services such as PayPal and Stripe.

Once your landing page or e-commerce site is up and running, you’ll need to promote your services. There are plenty of marketing tips, tricks, and techniques that you can use, but popular techniques include posting to social media channels such as Instagram and Facebook, and driving traffic to your website with email marketing campaigns. You should also take steps to ensure your site is ranking highly in Google’s search results.

Step 7: Bill Your Customers

Compared to many other businesses, running a successful reseller hosting business should require little day-to-day work. As a reseller, you just need to concentrate on signing up new clients. Your hosting provider will then work behind-the-scenes to provide your clients with the best possible customer experience. You can take all the credit – and collect all the payments!

To make the invoicing and payment process easier, we recommend using a web management platform. These can automate many of the administrative tasks associated with running a successful web hosting business. This includes activating new orders, renewing client subscriptions, and invoicing.

At A2 Hosting, our resellers have a choice of two popular web hosting management platforms. Our Web Host Manager Complete Solution (WHMCS) and Blesta licenses provides plenty of functionality to automate day-to-day administrative tasks. This makes it even easier to run a successful web hosting business.

Conclusion

Diversifying your income can help protect your business against fluctuations in the market. By reselling hosting services to your existing customers, you can maximize your revenue without any of the initial setup costs and ongoing maintenance expenses.

In this post, we’ve shared a seven-step plan to get your reseller hosting business up and running:

1. Choose your host
2. Choose your hosting package.
3. Create your hosting packages.
4. Plan your support system.
5. Define your terms of service.
6. Get your hosting business online.
7. Collect your money.

There are many factors you should take into consideration when choosing a hosting provider, but we’d recommend paying particular attention to uptime. If your hosting provider’s experience downtime, so will your customers.

The post How to Deliver 99.9% Uptime When Running a Successful Reseller Hosting Business appeared first on The A2 Posting.

The current economic situation may be volatile, but there are still ways to grow your business. We’re seeing an unprecedented rise in remote working services, online learning, and e-commerce. All of these areas have one thing in common: They all require web hosting.

In this post, we’ll look at why reseller hosting may be the key to protect, and potentially even grow your revenue during these challenging times. We’ll then show you how to setup and launch a successful hosting reseller business. Let’s get started!

An Introduction to Reseller Hosting

For the uninitiated, a reseller purchases products or services from a provider, with the intention to selling on those products and services. As a hosting reseller, you’ll purchase a hosting package from an established, trusted provider. You’ll then divide these resources into smaller hosting accounts, and offer them to your customers.

There’s various reasons why you might want to become a hosting reseller. This includes launching a new business that’s dedicated entirely to web hosting.

Starting your own hosting business requires significant upfront investment. As a minimum, you’ll need to purchase servers and software licenses, and setup your own network. By becoming a hosting reseller, you can eliminate practically all of these startup costs.

When starting a new business, the first few years can be tough. In fact, research suggests that around half of new businesses close within the first five years. To give your business the best possible chance of success, you should avoid unpredictable costs.

This is exactly what happens when you become a hosting reseller. Your provider is responsible for most of the costs. This includes replacing broken hardware, upgrading outdated software, and more. By becoming a hosting reseller, you can replace all of these unpredictable costs with a pre-agreed, scheduled payment plan.

Alternatively, you may be an existing business looking to boost your income. By becoming a reseller, you can upsell and cross-sell hosting services to your existing customers. This enables you to increase your revenue, without any of the costs associated with acquiring new customers.

Reselling can also be an effective way to diversify your income. Just because a product or service is in high demand now, doesn’t mean it’ll be flying off the shelves forever. By adding hosting to your repertoire, you can help insulate your business against market fluctuations. You can also protect your business against changes in customer spending habits.

Why Now Is the Time to Start a Reseller Hosting Business

Launching a new business, or breaking into a new market can feel daunting at the best of times. However, many businesses and consumers are increasingly turning to the internet to help them complete many essential, everyday tasks.

For organizations and individuals, the world wide web (and by extension, web hosting) has never been more important. If you’re debating whether now is the right time to start your reseller hosting business, know that many people currently have a real need for web hosting.

Let’s dive into this topic in more detail! In the following section, we’ll look at why hosting is becoming increasingly important for businesses, organizations, and consumers.

Remote Working Is the New Normal

Throughout 2020, businesses have relied on remote working to remain operational. Now, both Google and Facebook have informed staff that they won’t be returning to the office until July 2021 at the earliest. Twitter and Microsoft have also given their workforce the option to work from home on a permanent basis. It doesn’t like the remote working revolution is going to end anytime soon!

With many people continuing to work from home, tools that enable remote working are in high demand. As an A2 Hosting reseller, you can create packages that specifically target businesses who need to manage a remote workforce. These packages can feature add-ons that are designed to help these businesses support their remote workers.

Every A2 Hosting reseller account comes with the Softaculous installer built-in. You can use this installer to create multiple Softaculous plans that each feature a different combination of add-ons. You can then assign each of these Softaculous plans to the appropriate hosting plan. For example, you might create a plan that provides the tools customers need to build an e-commerce store, promote their SEO marketing business – or support their remote workforce.

To create a Softaculous plan, log into your reseller account, then launch Web Host Manager (WHM). In the left-hand menu, select Softaculous > Instant Installs.

This will launch the Softaculous installer. In the left-hand menu, select Plans > Add Plan. You can then create a plan and assign it to a hosting package. You can also pick-and-choose which add-ons will be included in this plan.

Now, whenever a reseller customer logs into their hosting account and launches Softaculous, they’ll have access to a carefully-curated list of add-ons. The customer can then install these add-ons, and will have instant access to advanced remote working tools.

People Are Spending a Record Amount of Time Online

The ongoing global pandemic has completely changed how many of us spend our free time. Throughout 2020, many communities have experienced lockdowns, or other social restrictions. This has forced many people to move their social, leisure, and entertainment needs online.

The last few months have been challenging for many businesses and organizations that rely on face-to-face interaction. However, as more people turn to the internet for entertainment, many online businesses have experienced record growth.

Netflix added over ten million new paid subscribers during the second quarter of 2020. Video communications specialists Zoom said daily users spiked to 200 million in March. Unsurprisingly, as stores around the world closed, online shopping giant Amazon experienced record profits.

More people are spending more time online than ever before. Now, many businesses are eager to join them. Some businesses are looking to expand their existing online offerings and services. Other companies may even be branching out onto the internet for the first time.

Regardless of the specifics, any business that is looking to invest in their online presence will require web hosting. By launching your hosting reseller business now, you could find yourself with a large, and growing customer base.

Internet Shopping Is at an All Time High

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a profound shift in consumer behavior. Throughout 2020, physical stores around the globe were forced to close. Unsurprisingly, this caused online shopping to reach an all-time high.

For businesses who already have an e-commerce store, there’s a huge incentive to grow their online presence. This might mean investing in hosting that can handle a surge in demand. It might also involve adding more web pages, or even launching additional e-commerce sites.

For businesses who previously only operated in-person, there’s been a push to move from “brick-to-click.” By launching an online store, businesses can remain operational, even in these uncertain and changeable times. These businesses may even be able to grow their customer base by connecting with a large, and growing audience.

You can leverage this online shopping revolution. As a hosting provider, you’re perfectly-positioned to offer exactly the services new, and expanding e-commerce businesses need.

Online Learning Is Growing Exponentially

It’s a sad reality that the pandemic has resulted in job losses. For those without employment, the job landscape is volatile and unpredictable.

Faced with the challenging situation, many businesses are evolving at a rapid rate. This might involve replacing lost revenue streams with new products and services. Some businesses might be scaling up, in order to cope with increased demand. Others businesses may have overhauled their everyday operations, in an effort to remain operational during the pandemic.

Recently, Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) spoke to Wall Street about the rapid rate of transformation. “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months,” said Satya Nadella. “From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security – we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything.”

In this rapidly-evolving market, many job seekers feel the need to acquire new skills. However, ‘upskilling’ during a pandemic isn’t easy. Many traditional educational institutes are grappling with the realities of offering an in-classroom experience amidst a global pandemic. Increasingly, people are turning to online learning.

Online course provider Udemy reported a 425 percent increase in enrolments following the introduction of social restrictions. Udemy also reported a 55 percent increase in course creation.

All online education and training providers require web hosting. With a large, and growing interest in e-learning, this could prove a lucrative niche for your hosting reseller business.

How to Choose the Right Hosting Provider for Your Reseller Hosting Business

As a hosting reseller, your services are completely dictated by your hosting provider. Get this step right, and you’re off to the best possible start. Get it wrong, and you’re putting your business at a huge disadvantage.

So, here are six tips to help you choose the right web hosting provider for you!

1. Do They Have a Good Reputation?

You should research what customers are saying about any potential hosting provider. Customer testimonials, case studies, and feedback posted on the provider’s website is a good place to start, but it’s always going to be biased.

To get the bigger picture, you should check platforms that aren’t under the hosting provider’s control. This includes third-party review sites such as TrustPilot.

You should also boot up your favorite search engine, and search for the hosting provider’s name. This will often reveal locations where people are discussing this provider, such as third-party forums, and blogs.

2. Do They Prioritize Performance?

Studies have shown that 40 percent of customers abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. This can affect key performance metrics, including bounce and conversion rates.

It’s impossible to determine exactly how search engines such as Google determine your website’s ranking. However, performance does appear to be a ranking factor.

To help your customers drive conversions and rank highly in search engine results, you should opt for a hosting provider that prioritizes performance. At A2 Hosting, our Turbo Serves are fine-tuned for performance. These servers can deliver up to 20x faster page loads compared to competing reseller hosting solutions.

3. Do They Offer 99.9 Percent Guaranteed Uptime?

Uptime is the amount of time the provider’s servers have been up and running, and is typically expressed as a percentage. Uptime is always important, but it’s crucial for running a successful hosting reseller business. If your hosting provider’s servers go down, it’ll take all your customers’ websites down with it.

For your customers, downtime means everything from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) penalties, missed sales, and loss of revenue. According to Gartner, unscheduled downtime can cost a company as much as $5,600 per minute.

If the customer’s website is down when Google tries to crawl their site, Google will be met by a 500 internal error. A study by SEO specialists Moz found that intermittent 500 internal server errors can cause tracked keywords to drop. Your customers may subsequently see their site plummet in the search results, after adopting you as their hosting provider.

Opt for a provider with unreliable uptime rates, and you’re going to wind up with very unhappy customers. When choosing a hosting provider, you should look for a high uptime percentage, and ideally an uptime guarantee.

4. Do They Have White Labelling Options?

Some customers have a negative impression of resellers. There’s the misconception that customers can get a better experience, by going directly to the “source.” Many customers also believe that reseller hosting is more expensive, as both the original provider and reseller are earning a profit.

White labelling can help you avoid these negative misconceptions. You should always look for a reseller that provides white labelling functionality.

At A2 Hosting, we give our resellers free rein to rebrand our products. This includes customizing your customers’ cPanel accounts, your nameservers, and your billing software. You can access these customization settings, by logging into your reseller WHM account and then selecting Customization.

You can also restyle the cPanel User Interface. There’s lots of cPanel style customizations available. Alternatively, you could create your own, bespoke style and then upload it to WHM.

5. Do They Offer 24/7 Customer Service?

There may be customer queries, complaints, and issues that you can resolve entirely in-house. However, occasionally you may need to defer to your hosting provider. Perhaps the customer is requesting an upgrade that requires you to liaise with your hosting provider. Alternatively, if a customer’s website goes down, then you’ll need to alert your hosting provider about this problem immediately, so they can resolve it as quickly as possible.

When you’re relaying queries between your customers and provider, it’s easy for delays to spiral out of control. To minimize these delays, your chosen provider should offer 24/7 customer support.

Ideally, your chosen provider should also be contactable via multiple channels. You can then choose the method that promises the quickest resolution. Sometimes, this will mean filing a support ticket, contacting live chat, or finding the answers yourself, by consulting resources such as the provider’s knowledge base.

6. Do They Provide WebHost Manager (WHM)?

We’ve mentioned it a few times already, but WHM deserves its own section. This is an essential tool for managing any reseller hosting business.

Using WHM, you can perform tasks such as creating your initial hosting packages, and creating, deleting, and suspending customer accounts. You can also use WHM to monitor your client accounts, right down to the resources they’re using.

Since it’s such an integral part of running a successful reseller hosting business, we’d recommend opting for a hosting provider that offers WHM as standard. If you opt for A2 Hosting, WHM comes built into your account.

How to Launch Your Hosting Business

Choosing the right provider is essential for getting your business off to the best possible start. However, there’s still lots more work to do!

Firstly, you’ll need to create your hosting packages. This process can vary, but by opting for a provider that has WHM built-in, you can make this process much easier. Simply log into the WHM console and select Add a Package. You can then specify the resources that you want to include in this hosting package.

Once you have your packages, you’ll need to plan your support system. Some customers may prefer to find answers for themselves, rather than contacting you directly. For these customers, you should provide self-help support.

Your self-help resources might include a knowledge base or wiki website, which you can create using plugins such as Encyclopedia. You can also provide technical documentation, using the Echo Knowledge Base plugin.

For more complex queries, customers may prefer to submit a support ticket. By implementing a ticketing system, your customers will have the option to submit detailed reports. They can also provide supplementary materials such as screenshots, which illustrate the problem they’re experiencing.

You can create a complete ticketing system, using a plugin such as Awesome Support. If you’d prefer a premium plugin, Support Ticket Management System will automatically assign a customer service agent to each new ticket. This ensures customer queries are resolved as quickly as possible.

You’ll also need to provide a Terms of Service, as this will help protect your reseller hosting business against legal action. You can create these legal documents using a tool such as TermsFeed, or the WP AutoTerms plugin.

Conclusion

The current situation is challenging. However, there are still opportunities to launch a successful reseller hosting business.

In this post, we explored how COVID-19 has created an increased need for web hosting, in several key areas. This includes businesses that require remote working tools, online learning, and e-commerce. By specifically targeting these demographics, you should be able to find an eager audience for your hosting services.

Even if you target one of these growth areas, your choice of hosting provider can still make or break your business. To give your new business venture the best possible chance of success, you should opt for a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, offers 24/7 customer support, and has an uptime guarantee.

Image credits: Unsplash.

The post How to Start a Hosting Business and Join the Remote Working Revolution appeared first on The A2 Posting.

However, by following some simple steps, you can find a provider that ticks every item on your wishlist. With the right hosting provider on your side, you can offer the best possible experience to your customers. You can also avoid much of the time-consuming admin that often accompanies running a successful reseller hosting business.

In this article, we’ll share 11 things to look for in a reseller hosting package. We’ll be covering elements such as white labelling, checking the fine print, and planning for the future of your business. We have lots to cover, so let’s get started!

What a Hosting Reseller Is (And Why You Might Want to Become One)

As a hosting reseller, you’ll purchase a hosting package from an established provider. You’ll pay a fixed fee for this server space, then resell these services to your own clients for a profit.

There are many reasons why reseller hosting is popular with businesses of all shapes and sizes. For established businesses, it can provide a valuable way to diversify your income. This can help protect your business against fluctuations in the market.

Reseller hosting is also a subscription-based model. Your customers will purchase a package, then pay you a recurring monthly or even annual fee. By selling hosting subscriptions, you can build long-term relationships with your existing customers.

In the best case scenario, reseller hosting may be the key to transforming one-off or casual purchasers into loyal repeat customers. These customers can then provide your business with a reliable, recurring revenue for years to come.

Some entrepreneurs also choose reseller hosting as the basis for a new business venture. By purchasing hosting from an established provider, you can eliminate many of the startup costs associated with starting a new business. This makes reseller hosting an attractive option for anyone looking to become their own boss.

11 Things to Look for in a Reseller Hosting Package

As a hosting reseller, your services are completely dictated by your hosting provider. Choosing the right hosting package is a strong start.

Get this step wrong, and you may face an uphill struggle. With this in mind, here are eleven things to look for in a reseller hosting package.

1. The Perfect Features for Your Ideal Customer

To appeal to your future customers, it’s important to find a package that reflects their needs as closely as possible. This requires a deep understanding of your target audience.

Tools such as Google Trends and Keyword Planner can help you build a picture of your ideal customer. This includes the features and resources your target audience cares about. It’s also a smart move to identify any providers who operate in your target area. These are your direct competitors.

When analyzing the competition, it may help to use tools such as SEMrush or SimilarWeb. These tools can help you understand your competitors’ marketing and advertising activities. For example, you can conduct legal Search Engine Optimization (SEO) espionage. It’s also a good idea to examine the hosting packages they offer, and their price points.

Generally, there are two main ways to successfully position yourself in the market. You can either offer hosting that’s more budget-friendly than your competitors, or present yourself as the premium alternative. The latter might involve offering more resources, developing unique features, or providing a higher level of customer service.

This research should influence your chosen hosting package. For example, if you decide to position yourself as a budget-friendly option, you should look for packages that fulfill your target audience’s minimum requirements, with no added extras. This will enable you to keep costs low and remain competitive. Alternatively, if you’re offering a premium service, it’s better to purchase a package that includes resources or features not currently offered by your direct competitors.

2. High Uptime Rates

When choosing a hosting package, we’d always recommend checking the provider’s uptime rates. This is the length of time the provider’s servers have been up and running, and is usually expressed as a percentage. Uptime is always important, but it’s crucial for becoming a successful hosting reseller.

If your hosting provider’s servers go down, it’ll knock all your customers offline, too. For your reseller hosting customers, downtime can have disastrous consequences including lost conversions and sales. According to Gartner, unscheduled downtime can cost a company as much as $5,600 every single minute. Your customers are not going to be happy if downtime costs them thousands of dollars.

A recent study by Moz also found that intermittent 500 internal server errors can cause issues with tracked keywords. Your customers may experience a drop in their SEO rankings after selecting you as their hosting provider.

Downtime is always bad news. However, it can be particularly frustrating when your hosting provider is to blame. As a hosting reseller, there’s very little you can personally do to resolve downtime, but you’ll still be the one receiving the customer complaints.

By choosing a hosting package that promises high uptime rates, you can give your business the best possible chance of success. Since uptime is such a crucial factor for your reseller hosting business, we’d recommend opting for a package that provides an uptime guarantee, wherever possible.

3. Positive Customer Reviews

It’s a smart move to research what customers are saying about any potential hosting provider. Customer testimonials, case studies, and feedback posted on the provider’s website is a good place to start. However, this information is hand-selected by the provider, which means it’s always going to be biased.

To get a more accurate insight, it’s a good idea to check platforms that aren’t under the hosting provider’s control. This includes third party review sites such as TrustPilot.

You should also boot up your favorite search engine, and search for the hosting provider’s name. This can reveal miscellaneous locations where people are discussing the provider, including third-party forums and blogs.

When researching a potential provider, you should pay particular attention to what customers are saying about their uptime and technical support. These factors are particularly important for running a successful reseller hosting business.

Wherever possible, it’s a good idea to look for feedback from other reseller hosting customers. If the general consensus is positive, then this could be the hosting provider for you.

4. A High Level of Performance

Performance is a crucial factor for any website. Studies have shown that 40 percent of customers abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. This can have a significant impact on key performance metrics, including bounce and conversion rates.

It’s impossible to know every factor that search engines use to determine a website’s ranking. However, performance does appear to be a major ranking factor for search engines such as Google. In particular, SEO specialists Moz identified a clear correlation between decreasing search rank and increasing Time To First Byte (TTFB). TTFB is how long it takes the server to respond to a connection attempt.

To help your customers drive conversions and rank highly in search engine results, it’s a good idea to opt for a hosting provider that prioritizes performance. At A2 Hosting, our Turbo Servers are fine-tuned for performance, and can deliver up to 20x faster page load speeds, compared to competing reseller hosting solutions.

5. 24/7 Technical Support

As a hosting reseller, you’re in a unique position. You’re expected to provide support to your customers. However, many of the back end processes are managed by your hosting provider. This means there are some issues you can’t resolve without contacting your provider.

For this reason, we recommend opting for a package that includes 24/7 customer support from your hosting provider. This ensures if your customers do encounter an issue, you can consult with your provider where necessary.

Ideally, your hosting provider should be contactable via multiple channels, as some channels are typically more efficient than others. For example, ringing the customer support desk is usually quicker than writing an email, and waiting for the response.

Your customer support has the potential to make or break your business. However, if your hosting provider isn’t available 24/7, this can result in significant delays. From the customer’s perspective, you’re the one who isn’t responding to their queries fast enough. This reflects badly on your business, and can make it impossible to offer a good level of customer service.

As a hosting reseller, there are plenty of steps you can take to improve your customer service. This might include adding live chat to your website, or creating an informative FAQ, knowledge base, or wiki website. However, without 24/7 support, you may struggle to resolve all customer complaints within a reasonable time frame.

6. Compatible Terms of Service

As a reseller, your Terms of Service need to adhere to your hosting provider’s acceptable usage policies. Before purchasing a hosting package, it’s important to read the provider’s Terms of Service carefully. Their policy may conflict with how you plan to market, distribute, or resell their hosting services. You should also ensure there are no rules or restrictions that could make this product undesirable to your target audience.

If you’re unsure, you can contact the potential hosting provider for guidance. A good hosting provider should be willing to work with you, to ensure your Terms of Service are in line with their own policies.

If you’re unsure about your Terms of Service, it may help to generate a rough draft. You can generate Terms of Service boilerplate using tools such as TermsFeed or WP AutoTerms. You can then compare this draft against the potential provider’s Terms of Service. This can help you identify any conflicts, or other issues that may make this an unsuitable package for your reseller hosting business.

7. White Label Branding

Some website owners have a negative impression of resellers. There’s the misconception that customers can get a better experience, by going directly to the source.

Other customers may believe that reselling hosting is more expensive, as both the original provider and reseller are earning a profit. If you publicize your identity as a reseller, some customers may even track down your host, in order to compare your prices.

White labelling makes it possible to create your own identity, independent of your hosting provider. We’d always recommend opting for a provider that offers white labelling functionality, as this is essential for building a strong brand. It also helps you avoid all the negative misconceptions surrounding hosting resellers.

At A2 Hosting, we give all our resellers free rein to rebrand our products. In particular, you can customize the cPanel interface to feature your own logo, favicons, and company name.

You can also add links to your own customer support and documentation. This is important for creating a consistent brand identity. It also provides a better user experience, by making it easy for customers to access the support and documentation they need.

8. The Ability to Create and Manage Your Own Packages

The reseller package you purchase should make it easy to create and manage your own hosting packages. This includes creating multiple plans that suit the varying needs of your target audience.

Different businesses have different needs. These requirements can also fluctuate over time, for example during periods of growth.

By offering different levels of hosting packages, you can maximize your appeal, and your sales. For example, many hosting providers offer a Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum pricing model.

At A2 Hosting, all our reseller accounts come with WebHost Manager (WHM) as standard. You can use WHM to manage every part of your reseller business, including creating client accounts, monitoring bandwidth usage – and creating a wide range of hosting packages.

If you’re an A2 Hosting customer, you can access WHM by logging into the A2 Hosting client area. From here, you can choose your reseller hosting account, then select Login to WHM.

To create a package, simply select Add a Package. You can then give your package a name, and specify the resources that you want to include in this package. We give our resellers the flexibility to customize every part of their hosting packages, including specifying the Disk Quota, Max Databases, and Max Addon Domains.

Once you’re happy with your hosting package, click Save. You can then repeat this process to create all the hosting packages you need to attract the widest possible audience.

9. Packages That Let You Grow

Hopefully, your reseller hosting business will be a huge success. You may even need to upgrade your hosting packages in order to accommodate your growing customer base. Alternatively, you may decide to upgrade your hosting packages, in order to attract larger clients.

Ideally, your chosen provider will offer a range of reseller hosting packages. At A2 Hosting, we’ve designed a variety of packages specifically for our resellers.

For startups and smaller businesses, we have a budget-friendly Kickstart package, which features 60 GB of disk space and 600 GB data transfer. This package is ideal if you’re targeting customers with more minimalist hosting requirements, or tighter budgets.

For resellers looking to catch the attention of big businesses, we have a premium Scale package. This package features 270 GB of disk space and 2700 GB data transfer. Our Scale packages provide the resources you need, in order to attract customers with more demanding hosting requirements.

It’s also important to consider that customer needs can fluctuate over time. At A2 Hosting, we understand that the best providers are flexible. To help future-proof your business, we make it easy to upgrade your hosting packages. Simply open a ticket in our Customer Portal explaining the changes you need to make, and our customer support staff will be happy to help.

10. Powerful and Accessible Control Panels

WHM is a great start, but your chosen hosting package should include additional management tools. In particular, we recommend opting for a hosting provider that offers cPanel with all their hosting packages. cPanel is one of the most popular control panels for web hosting accounts, and is generally considered the industry standard.

You can use cPanel to manage essential reseller hosting tasks. This includes creating new users, monitoring the resources your customers are consuming, and creating subdomains. You can also use cPanel to install a range of additional tools, via the built-in Softaculous installer. This gives you the flexibility you need, to customize and enhance your reseller account.

At A2 Hosting, we provide cPanel as standard. In addition, all your reseller customers will have their own cPanel accounts that you can customize with your own branding. This enables you to provide the best possible customer experience, while creating a strong brand identity.

11. Built-in Billing Software

Running a successful reseller hosting business can require a significant amount of admin. To make your day-to-day life easier, we recommend opting for a package that includes a web management platform.

A web management platform can automate many essential administrative tasks. This leaves you free to focus on what really matters – growing your reseller hosting business.

There are plenty of third party web management platforms on the market. However, all our reseller accounts come with Web Host Manager Complete Solution (WHMCS) built-in.

WHMCS can automate many of the tasks associated with running a successful reseller hosting business. This includes renewing customer subscriptions, invoicing, and collecting payments from your satisfied customers.

In particular, you can use WHMCS to automate creating customer accounts, and activating their subscriptions. Increasingly, customers expect to have access to accounts, products, and services as soon as they complete the payment process.

Forcing new customers to wait while you manually activate their account is a poor customer experience. By opting for a package that includes a tool such as WHMCS, you can automate the activation process, and onboard new customers at any time of the day or night.

WHMCS also provides some useful additional tools, including built-in analytics. This helps you monitor the success of your business, without necessarily having to master any third party analytics platforms.

Once you’ve purchased your A2 reseller hosting account, you can install WHMCS using the built-in Softaculous installer. Alternatively, all our reseller hosting accounts support the Blesta billing platform, which is another popular management platform amongst resellers.

Conclusion

As a reseller, choosing the right hosting provider is crucial to the success of your business. By finding a provider that offers exactly the features your business needs, you can give your new business venture the best possible chance of success.

In this article, we covered 11 things to look for in a reseller hosting provider. This included finding a provider that offers 24/7 support, as this is the key to resolving any back end issues quickly. We also recommended that you plan for the future, by opting for a hosting package with lots of opportunity to grow.

When choosing a provider, it’s a good idea to pay particular attention to uptime. If your hosting provider’s servers go down, it’ll take all of your customers’ websites down with it. That can only mean one thing: unhappy customers! To keep your existing customers happy and attract new customers, it’s a smart move to look for a hosting provider that offers an uptime guarantee.

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