I started a webhosting business this weekend and this is how I did it.

Why Start A Webhosting Business?

You might manage websites for friends and local clients or sell websites. When you own your own webhosting company you can have them login and manage their site by themselves and also get premade programs to collect money every month from them.

To make money.

Also, when Selling a website you can place the website on a new webhosting account at your webhost and have the buyer login and move the site or give them a free length of time to keep the site hosted there after the sale (bonus!).

There are many other reasons to start a webhost, however this post is for those that want a small time webhosting business where they don’t want to manage their own hardware,etc. but do want the front of a webhosting company for their clients.

What Will The WebHosting Company’s End Result Look Like?

The end goal is to have a site like yourhost.com where people will go to, they will sign up for a webhosting plan, the site will take their money, it will email them some nameservers like ns1.yoursite.com and then after they set their domains nameservers to yourhost.com then they will be hosted with you;)

How Do I Set Up My Own WebHosting Company?

Setting up your webhosting company is a 2 step process:

1. You need someone to do the webhosting/serving of the files for you (a reseller)

2. You need some software to take the money and setup the new accounts on your server

Let’s discuss:

Your Server Or WebHosting Of The Files

You need to purchase a reseller account somewhere that where the files will physically go. I used Hostgator. Their reseller account was only $25 per month when I joined and they had everything I needed plus pretty quick support ticket answering.

$25 sounds like a bunch for regular webhosting but this isn’t regular webhosting, it’s RESELLER webhosting that allows you to start your own host ;)

Besides, if you charge your clients $14.95 per month, you only need 2 clients and you are in Profit :)

Your Software To Set Things Up And Take Money

The software I used was WHMCS. Basically whmcs is the software that makes you look like your own webhosting company to the customer.

WHMCS will cost you money to use but fortunately it’s FREE if you sign up with Hostgator.

After you signup with Hostgator for your hosting go to this special link on their site and you will get a free license.

All of the decent web hosting softwares cost a pretty penny so be sure to visit that link only after you sign up for hosting (they verify your domain is registered with Hostgator)

How To Setup Your Hostgator Info

Setting up your Hostgator to be the reseller or to webhost your web hosting company’s files is real simple.

After you join with them just go to yourdomain.com/chm and add a new package (like the number of domains allowed, number of subdomains allowed, etc), put your domain under this new package, and that’s it ;) For more help just write support there, they are real helpful.

NOTE: Even though Hostgator is doing the webhosting for you, the customer will never know, your frontend is handled by the whmcs software ;) Kinda like outsourcing.

How To Setup Your WHMCS Software

After you have your webhosting setup go to WHMCS.com and login and then go to the license tab and you will find your free license and also the download links.

Upload whmcs to your domain and follow the install instructions.

The “configuration” was the hardest part for me. Basically you need to go down every link under the “configuration” tab and pick your preferences. They are unique to each person’s webhosting company so i can’t help you much but here are a few notes that helped me.

Note 1: After installation you can find the customer area here: /whmcs/index.php

Note 2: You need to make you own homepage with your webhosting offers and then Integrate your pages with wchms. For instance you make a page that says “buy this package” and the link will go to a whmcs page on your site. These links can be found in the “Links Integration” part of whmcs.

Note 3: To automatically have your new hosting customers accounts magically and hiddenly setup on your Hostgator account you need to first create a product and then under the “modules” tab on the product page you choose “cpanel” and then enter the “package name” that you created from earlier. I looked for this step forever and then everything was peachy.

That’s It

After you signup with a Hostgator reseller account, then install and configure whmcs, you just need to put your own graphics and “look” together and you are on your way.

Instead of your friends and clients getting free webhosting from you can now put them on your “webhost” and have it do the billing for you.

The process is a bit technical but not impossible. I setup my host over this weekend. You pay for support so use it! Don’t hesitate to send support tickets before you get frustrated and good luck ;)