Is cheap reseller hosting the key to MSP growth?
MSP resellers are rethinking their businesses. With the market expected to grow to the tune of more than 12 percent (Research and Markets), there’s plenty of opportunity in this space. Could cheap reseller hosting be the key to growth?
In the past, most MSPs were able to realize growth by offering one more IT solution. It might have been better database management. It could have been improving the helpdesk. Maybe it was promising more uptime for network infrastructure or faster download speeds for a customer’s intranet.
Today, the office has expanded far beyond the walls of the office building. Local businesses are looking for integrated cloud solutions. As they seek to make their mark in the digital space, they’re turning to their trusted MSPs for more varied web solutions.
That’s where cheap reseller hosting and other solutions come into play for MSP resellers.
Your clients want more than IT
In the past, customers bought IT services that focused on in-house computing power alone.
The reality of today’s market is that everything is integrated. With cloud computing, the company network goes beyond the four walls of the office, and companies need more in order to be found online, sell online, and work online securely. After all, the remote workforce is expected to keep increasing in the future (Forbes).
As their trusted digital expert, it’s little wonder your clients are now looking to you to help them in other areas of their business. They want an MSP reseller.
Streamlining providers to create more integrated solutions as an MSP reseller
It’s easy to see why a customer might look to a service provider to offer cheap web hosting and more. After all, they want to ensure their tech solutions work seamlessly together. If they have a patchwork of providers, they’ll also have a patchwork of solutions that can lead to incompatibility and complications.
Think about a company that needs web design, SEO, and a cloud-hosted portal accessed through the website. If they have three different providers working on each of these services, it’s going to be a little messy. SEO may not be integrated with web design. The website may not support the client portal.
Now imagine this company has its web portal on a different host than the website. That could mean plenty of headaches getting everything integrated.
Getting into the MSP reseller hosting game
It’s easy to see why one of today’s most popular MSP industry trends is offering integrated solutions for clients. More often than not, that means adding some kind of MSP reseller hosting package to your suite of services.
Getting into the hosting game isn’t always easy, though. There are already plenty of cheap reseller hosting services out there, many with great reputations. Even if you wanted to build a new service from scratch, the hardware to make a server farm is not a small investment.
How can an MSP like you compete with platforms like WordPress for website hosting? Moreover, why should your customers take a risk on a new hosting service?
The answer is they don’t need to. Cheap reseller hosting is a solution that works for everyone.
What is cheap reseller hosting?
Instead of going toe-to-toe with the WordPresses of the world, why not join them?
An MSP reseller program allows you to do just that. By reselling a website solution, you can provide websites hosted on trusted platforms. Your customers get the reliability of the big name, along with the service they trust from your team.
What that means is they can turn to you for help when they need to troubleshoot. They can also ask you for solutions when they need to add a new service. You can also make sure the website solution works with the other IT services you offer to customers.
Cheap reseller hosting benefits you and the hosting service
Reselling white-label website solutions has benefits for your customers. How can your IT business benefit?
Many local businesses are already turning to their MSPs for more integrated solutions. Offering a white-label website solution lets you deliver what your customer wants when they need it to ensure customer satisfaction and retention. It allows you to diversity your revenue stream, upsell clients, and stop referring clients to agencies instead. It also means you don’t need to take the overhead costs on in house. You don’t need to create your own server farm nor hire the team to manage it when you resell hosting.
That helps you keep costs low while also retaining the customer. Since you’re offering more, you may also be able to attract new customers looking for integrated solutions
It’s win-win for everyone. Your customers get reliable hosting, while your IT company delivers more for your customers, turns a profit, and can grow into new areas of business.
Thinking beyond web hosting
Savvy MSP resellers are already adding cheap reseller hosting to their suite of services for clients. Business leaders on the cutting edge are thinking beyond cheap reseller hosting, though.
What other services could you offer to your customers? Maybe you could be a domain reseller, too, or add website design into the mix. What if your maintenance packages now included SEO too?
Digital marketing is another stream you can look into as you seek to deliver more for your clients. Today, marketing and IT cross over often. SEO is the responsibility of marketers and website maintenance teams alike.
What about content marketing? Blogging is often part and parcel of creating content for a website. It also goes hand-in-hand with SEO. If you want to offer SEO services, should you also help your clients host a blog on their website?
Whitel-label PPC campaigns may be another area you want to look into, as this advertising channel crosses over with tech. Your team might have a better understanding of how programmatic ads work, for example.
Finally, don’t forget about the backend of the business. Demand for cloud computing, mobile solutions, and more is on the rise (Yahoo!), especially in the age of the mobile office.
How to get started with reseller programs
Joining reseller programs could be the key to MSP growth, but how do you start adding them to your service bundles? If you contact each seller, it could take you a while. Reseller programs often have strict criteria you have to meet.
Even if you meet the criteria for one program, it might take you a long time to get up to speed for another. Adding reseller programs one by one can be a slow, difficult process.
A better solution? Team up with a third party that offers many different programs in one place. They’ve already jumped through the hoops to join the reseller programs. That means you can get started sooner. Plus, you might just find everything your clients are looking for in one digital marketplace—and more.
