Your Questions About Domain Web Host

admin answers:

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Best wishes!

admin answers:

Mmmmm….. Sounds like you are really starting from scratch, and I would recommend you get a bit more experience with the domain/hosting environment before selling to others as you will be called on to support problems, and you want to be able to communicate with both your clients and your suppliers.

If you are trying to go for the ‘cheap and cheerful’ market, then I’d caution against it as there are a lot of players out there who can provide very cheap hosting. To make a few bucks, you are going to have to charge more, so what is the advantage to them using you instead of another service?

In practice, it is very easy.

1. Buy a cheap ‘reseller’ hosting account.

There are many ‘reseller’ packages available from different places (avoid digitalvisionhosting.com as my experience has been they are too unreliable). These usually allow you to host multiple domains for a flat monthly/annual fee. For example if you have a 25 domain hosting package for $200 a year, then each domain will be costing you $8 a year (Whether there are actually any domains being hosted or not). You can then sell individual domain hosting for whatever you think you can get, and the difference will be your gross profit.

A reseller account usually gives you a ‘Web Host Manager’ where you set up ‘packages’ (which control the amount of resources you make available), and ‘accounts’ (which you make for each domain that is hosted) which have their own ‘Control Panel’.

2. Domains

Domains are cheap on the whole. It would seem pointless to buy domains before you know what anyone wants, so you would purchase a domain when you know what is wanted.

Domains are registered with a ‘Registrar’. There are many domain registration sites. You need to check that a domain is available before you can buy it.

I would think it unlikely you will be able to make any money selling domains as you would have sell them more expensively than you buy them, and the client can probably get them cheaper elsewhere, (unless you can buy in bulk which I would think unlikely, at least to start with).

Also, you do not need to buy domains to host them. The Registrar control the Name Servers (DNS) of the domain. To host the domain, the domain DNS records need to point to your hosting DNS Servers, which is easy for the domain owner to do.

However, there can be limitations, especially on the ‘free’ domains which are often offered if you buy a cheap hosting account for a fixed period (often a year). The Hosting provider usually ‘owns’ the domain but lets you use it, and locks the domain so it cannot be transferred. The economy goes something like this:

Sell a hosting package for a year. Say is costs you $10 and you charge $80. You buy the domain for $10. Gross profit to you of $60. You ‘own’ the domain so you can control where it is hosted (you want it on your hosting of course), and prevents the client from moving to another host, thereby losing you an account. This forces the client to stay with your hosting as you can refuse to allow it to be hosted elsewhere.

I personally do not like this practice, but it is very common for so called ‘free’ domains. As you can see, it is not really free as such, but that’s business I guess.

I won’t try and go into all the issues, but you have to bear in mind that if the client does not want to renew the domain and your hosting, then you will be left with a domain that is not wanted, and still have to pay the renewal fee, or let it expire and it will become available for registration again on a first come first serve basis.

Other issues:

If you are going to host domains, then you will likely have clients who do not know what theya re doing, or screw things up, and you will be expected to support them. If you do not, then you are unlikely to get a good reputation, so consider your terms and conditions very carefully, and get some experience before you go for it.

It is easy to do if you know what you are doing, and use the ‘reseller’ approach. If you want to go into buyig your own servers etc, then you will up the costs and effort, and is this something your are competent to do yet?

My advice is, get familiar with the environment of buying and hosting domains in a small way to make sure you can handle it comfortably. After that, it is more a less of question of scaling up.

Remember there is a lot of competition around, and you are not going to take on the big boys? So you will be a smaller ‘added value’ type of reseller, so what value can you bring to your enterprise and attract others to part with the money to you and not someone else?

I’m not cautioning against it, but I get the impression you do not know very much about this, and I suggest you need to know a lot more before you embark on something like this.

But don’t let that put you off if you are really serious. Good luck!

admin answers:

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admin answers:

Mac users might want to download BBedit Lite, a more powerful, and free mac text editor: http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit_lite.html

Free Mac Web Design Software: http://web-design.lovetoknow.com/Free_Mac_Web_Design_Software

Free HTML Editors for Macintosh: http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmleditors/tp/aatp_frehtedmac.-0cZ.htm

CSS Tutorials:

http://www.w3schools.com/Css/default.asp

CSS Tutorial

http://www.echoecho.com/css.htm
http://www.html.net/tutorials/css/
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss
http://htmldog.com/guides/cssbeginner/
http://www.davesite.com/webstation/css/