Question for Hosting Re-Sellers

If you can't support said customers, don't offer said services.

Each person that answers this is going to have a different answer depending on how well things are run. For the most part, if your parent host runs a solid service that's well maintained, most of your "support" requests aren't going to be problems, but more so inquiries, how to do things etc.

There are hosting companies that sell reseller accounts with end-user support included. All support inquiries get forwarded to their support desk and they answer your customers problems for you, all white label. Innohosting and ezpz hosting are 2 examples. You should take a look at the reviews on webhostingtalk

I guess what I'm thinking is that if you sell web hosting for very cheap, as a benefit to existing customers, say for $3/ month, then the time spent answering just one support ticket in a month (whether you do it yourself or hire someone to do so) from a customer could put you in the hole on that customer... Then there are those customers who need a lot of hand holding and could submit 5 or 6 tickets in a month... so i guess its just not viable in my instance. If my perception is somehow wrong on this, please let me know. I'll look into the white label services that provide the support as well. Thanks again to you both for your input.

I would never offer hosting for such a low price, it's not worth it. Sell it as a premium product and charge $25 - $50 a month, letting them know that you will take care of everything for them, maybe give them a small update to their website each month.

If you're customers are not technically inclined, I see no reason why you should give them cpanel access unless they ask for it. Let them contact you when they need something done, like adding an email address to the account. Or use WHMCS settings to limit the functions they have access to in cpanel (I think you can still do that)

A frequent problem clients have on shared hosting is the email server getting blacklisted. One way you can limit the number of support inquiries is to offload email handling for the client's domain to gmail ($5/month) or outlook.com (free). This lessens the load on your servers and gives your clients unlimited email storage and better email stability. Show your client how you're looking after them by doing this. Show them that they can login to gmail with a web browser or their email client, and no one will know that their domain email routes through gmail.

Also, look at support inquiries as a chance to keep in touch with your clients and show them how indispensable you are. Are your clients high value? Do you see the possibility to upsell more products and services to them? If so, I would handle all support myself. On the other hand, if your primary product is low margin, I would not bother.

you can make it work
but its a job still
you need to put it the work
and the profit must be fine for you