Who has a HostGator Reseller account?

I am not a hostgator reseller but I have a free reseller account with another company and it allows me to set my own prices. It also lets me set up my own hosting plans. The bandwidth and storage that my customers get depends on the plan they buy.

I have a Hostgator reseller account. You get a set amount of storage and bandwidth based on the package that you pick.

The only thing really different is you get a Control panel that manages all of the accounts. You set up your own packages and create new accounts from there. All of the accounts you create get their own cPanel.

One of the things I would have a hard time leaving is the free license for WHMCS, which is a billing system. I love it!

You set your hosting prices at whatever you want them to be. It really doesn't have anything to do with the reseller account. You pay Hostgator for your account and your clients pay you. They don't even see that it is on Hostgator's servers if you set up your own nameservers.

yea host gator is great and good thinking offering hosting so you get that recurring income coming in.

Thanks guys for the info. I will search Host Gator for more info.

Do you think its the right route to take when providing Hosting when flipping a domain or is there another route that might be easier.

I was thinking about just giving free hosting through my own Hosting account until I heard about this.

I switched over from the Baby Croc to the reseller (aluminum I believe) acct due to all the sites I was flipping. I am really glad I finally did it as having a separate Cpanel for each site is nice and easy when it comes time to move the site.

I am really wanting to upgrade to a Reseller account also, for some of the same reasons mentioned above. I have a couple of questions.

Hostgator has told me that if I upgrade, they will move my account "as-is." In other words, all of my add-on domains will remain add-on domains all under one cPanel. That is fine for the moment, but I am getting ready to sell some of the sites I have.

Once I sell, if the buyer wants to pay for hosting through me, I would want to move the site to its own cPanel. Is this done in exactly the same way as if I sell a site to someone on Flippa and move it from my hosting to theirs? Just basically FTP the files from one site and then to the other?

Also, I am not real savvy about how much space and bandwidth are required for a site. Will the aluminum plan be sufficient to start out? Or is that something that will be outgrown quickly?

And finally, someone on another forum mentioned that there is a choice of WHM Autopilot and WHM Complete Solution. What does that mean and what are the differences between the two?

Thanks!
Teresa

It is true that if you are a reseller, you will need to provide the support to your customers.

That said, a good reseller company will have your back. When a customer reports a problem to you, or asks a question you don't know the answer to, you simply pass it along to your upstream providers. They respond and you pass that information along.

The best way for this to work is to setup your own helpdesk system. This works whether you're on a reseller account, have your own VPS or dedicated servers. If you use a program like WHMCS, which is free through HostGator, you can automate the provisioning of your hosting accounts, while providing a reliable and trackable way to manage your customer service.

The best part about this system is, when communicating with your customers starts taking up too much of your time -- or you get to that point when you realize you need to fire yourself from customer service -- you can outsource this piece of the business.

If you're going to go this route, I recommend you start planning now for how you're going to scale the business.

Thanks, Michelle. That sounds like a pretty sensible answer, and kind of along the lines of what I was thinking already. Just because I go from a Baby plan to a Reseller plan, Hostgator is not going to drop me like a hot potato. There may be a middle man between my customers and Hostgator (me) but Hostgator is still there to help.

Another question Michelle. Are you saying that some sort of Help Desk System is built into the WHMCS? Or is that a separate issue that I need to start researching right away?

Now I have another question. Hostgator is giving me the option of having my own private nameservers, or the nameservers that they gave me. I am trying to decide if there is any advantage to having private nameservers. (I can't see any.)

It will be a lot more trouble to use the private ones. I will need to go and register them with each of my registrars, add the A records to the domain... is it worth it?

Is there any reason I shouldn't just use the nameservers assigned by Hostgator?

You have a management console from where you can create hosting accounts, and then you can log-in into cpanel of each of those accounts. Its pretty simple actually.

I've got a Hostgator reseller account, but these days I don't resell hosting with sites I sell. I used to do, but didn't like the additional responsibility of providing technical support - it felt like quite a weight had gone the day I gave it up. I realise that you're more or less a middleman and can go to Hostgator if there's a problem, but even though I had few (if any) problems the constant prospect of them arising was more hassle than it was worth to me and pointing buyers towards hosting through an affiliate link was much more appealing on balance.

Even without selling hosting the reseller account still has it's uses. It's a doddle to transfer sites, cpanel and all, and if you list your site as a product with no associated hosting in the included WHMCS (someone mentioned this above) you can configure WHMCS so that you can just add the buyer to it as a client, create the transaction and it will just e-mail the buyer a download link as well as any additional links you might want to include to instructional pdfs that you've created etc. Buyers might never need to get as far as your help desk, but it's there in WHMCS if they do.

Setting this up isn't a flawless process (I can't even remember how I did mine, but do recall a few hiccups) but it more than pays you back in terms of time and convenience once it's done.

been with HG since 2005 - great service - high availability (uptime) - no issues with spam on their ip addresses (spamhauz) - offer great addons like WHMCs and WHMAutoPilot

overall it a great company to do business with

I have three reseller accounts to keep different type sites separate and I would not ever try to do without them it again. Not only do I use them for client sites but for my own as well. And as mentioned they are especially useful for flipping sites.

Hello Everyone,

I just purchased the aluminum reseller account from host gator. How do I go about setting up my own domains? I was looking around the log in area and all I see is the package section. Thank you in advance....

I have a HG reseller account exactly for this purpose and for the purpose of having separate cPanels for each of my websites. You're allowed to create packages in your main account and once you've made a new account you can assign it to one of the packages you have created. The money you collect is not integrated with this so it really doesn't matter how much you charge.

You have a lot of options.
Best might be: your customers buy their own hosting at Host Gator and you get an affiliate commission.

Is there any SEO advantage to using a reseller account as opposed to a business account which is what i currently have? I am looking at putting up many different niche sites and wondered if the search engines could see that they are all coming from one account and penalize me for this. Otherwise, if this isn't the case, does it make sense to stick with my business plan and continue to use add-on domains? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!!