Selling websites - Basic question

Hi,
There are two elements to transfering a website to another person:

1. The domain name which you can transfer to the new owner by pushing the domain name to their account. The buyer normally just has to sign up for a free account with your domain name registrar.

2. The website files themselves, and in most cases all you do is download your files using an FTP program, zip them up and send them to the new owner. The buyer of the site can then upload the files to their own hosting account.

Kind regards,
Tony

Just to clarify for you:

The "push" is just to transfer the domain name. For example if you registered your domain name at Godaddy, the buyer would have to have an account with Godaddy (if not it is free for them to register) and then you push/transfer the domain from your Godaddy account to theirs.

That does not transfer the actual site content. To transfer the content, you would have to transfer all the files for the site from your server to their server. Depending on what type of site (Wordpress/HTML/Other) it is and who you host it with would determine how "easy" it is to transfer the files.

Basically you will want to download/backup all the files on the site and forward tose files to the new owner. there is a good chance that the new owners will know how to do this or their web host company will do it for them.

Just explain in your ad when you are selling it that you can't offer a lot of assistance for the transfer so they know ahead of time if you don't feel comfortable doing it. You can also outsource the transfer for $20-$30 or less if you wanted to.

Hope that help a little more.

You might also consider hosting the site yourself with its own cpanel account so when you do sell it, you can just transfer the cpanel account and require him/her to move the files themselfs.

All you would have to do is send him cpanel login, and transfer the domain in his name.

Thanks for the tips guys, I think I got it

If you are going to do this in on a consistent basis ... if you want to make it easiest for yourself and the buyer, I would recommend getting a reseller web-host account. That way, you can setup the sites to be individual accounts, and then you can just update the account with the new owner's name and give them the login/password. That way, there is no transferring or copying of files or databases required.

An advantage of this is that you can give them a few free months and then charge them a recurring monthly or yearly fee (at a fair price of course), and they are free to transfer files and database to another host if and whenever they want.

I think you'll find reseller accounts for about $25 to $50 per month but remember, you get to keep the money your customers pay you for hosting.

Be careful on the details of the reseller account you pick. Choose wisely if you don't want to get caught up with providing hosting support to your customers. Some reseller hosts will handle the end user support, some will charge YOU for it.

And others leave the support for you to handle ... you get free support but your customers don't. Your customers contact you for support and you contact reseller support for issues you cannot handle, then you handle the solution with your customer and on and on ...

Also as with picking any web host, make sure the one you pick has the features you want, like support for scripting, cron, fantastico, cpanel, admin cpanel, multiple domains, site-builders, web-space, bandwidth, etc ...

As far as the domain name, if you do a regular transfer of the domain name to the buyer, the buyer will usually have to pay a transfer fee, but this also usually extends the domain renewal for a year, so this could be an added cost to the buyer. So, check with your registrar to see if the buyer will pay a fee for transfers.

You can also get a reseller account with a registrar but again, check the details. Some have big startup fees, and some have monthly fees and monthly minimums. Also, make sure that you can transfer an existing/active domain without a fee. Also check for features and like parking, forwarding, web-space, email, and private-whois, and if there are fees for them.

Perhaps other warriors can recommend some good reseller hosts and reseller registrars.

Kevin

When i flip a site that has a mysql database attached for example some of the sites I flip are either bans, custom amazon sites or wordpress blogs and I either offer free hosting (depending on the price) or include the transference of the site to their domain space. if they dont have a domain then i send them to hostgator through my affiliate link (gets me $50) and setup the database etc after the purchase.