There are many customer management tools on the market, but not all of them are catered to web hosting. In particular, the best way to make sure payments are received on time is to have some type of recurring billing setup. Hosting is usually relatively inexpensive, and most customers will not mind having a small amount deducted from their credit cards or PayPal accounts each month.

The other important aspect of customer management is communication. Keep in regular contact with your customers. Many conflicts that happen when dealing with people online are the result of misunderstandings. With email, social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, and your website’s blog, you can stay in contact with your customers without being overly invasive. Welcome to the world of web hosting, and good luck.

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Answer: Reseller hosting is when a web hosting provider sells you a number of bulk hosting accounts that you can then turn around and market to your own customers for profit. It differs from a dedicated hosting in account in that the reseller does not have to manage the server or the account. They only manage the business side of the transactions.

This type of setup is ideal for those who do not have the time and manpower to run a full web hosting company but still have the business savvy to close hosting deals in a competitive market. Most web hosts offer reseller packages that vary according to number of accounts, hosting space, and/or bandwidth.

With dedicated server hosting, the web hosting provider leases full servers to clients, and those clients turn around and either host a single large website or several shared hosting accounts, acting as an independent web hosting company of its own. In this situation, the servers are often unmanaged, with the hosting providers only responsible for the data center security and maintenance.

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I eventually bought my own domain name and learned HTML to make my site better and more professional. Traffic to my site increased to the point where my first web host was no longer adequate, and I moved to a VPS (virtual private server), which allowed me more flexibility and bandwidth. But it also increased the cost. At that point I decided to begin offering hosting services to small businesses and non-profit organizations to help offset the cost of my server.

It did not take long for my company to outgrow the the memory constraints of the VPS, and I decided to lease a full remote server. Linux was my operating system of choice, as I had experience working with it on my VPS and working with Solaris on my first server. It seemed like the logical choice, even though I did not know a lot about managing a server by myself or the security concerns that go along with it.

In addition to becoming a web host, I also became a domain reseller. Most of my clients did not have domain names or initial web sites, so it was a natural progression to also start offering domains to my clients. I also began to offer web design services, relying on content management systems that allowed the clients to take over full control of their sites after they were designed, since most of them were on limited budgets.

Over the years I experienced many challenges and obstacles selling domains, hosting, and designing web sites. In Part 2, I reveal some of those obstacles and how I dealt with them.