Part 3: Hosting Services
- 3.1. Hosting Plans
- 3.2. Domain Pricing
- 3.3. Buy Hosting Account
3.1 Hosting Services
3.1.1 My Offers
To help you structure online your reseller store offerings, we’ve prepared 3 examples. Their purpose is to give you basic orientation and lead you through the necessary steps included in the setup of your web hosting services.
Example 1: You’d like to sell web hosting plans only:
If you'd like to sell web hosting plans only, start out by choosing first which hosting packages you'll enable for offering on your web store. Go to ‘Hosting Services’ -> ‘Hosting plans’ in your Reseller Control Panel and choose either our Business, Corporate or Enterprise alternatives, or activate all of them. You can add also custom-built plans set up with our Liquid Plan Builder. Don’t forget to select at least one hosting offer to be displayed on your store’s index page to promote your web hosting services. The ‘FREE Domain Offer’ boxes should remain unchecked for all plans. Finish your settings with arranging the priority order in which your plans will be appearing on the store index (use the action arrows in the last column of the table).
Example 2: You’d like to sell web hosting plans with domain names included in the packages (separate prices):
If you wish to sell domain names together with your web hosting plans simply activate the TLDs (top-level domain names) that you wish to make available for reselling to your clients. In order to do that, go to the ‘Domain Pricing’ -> ‘My Offers’ section in your Reseller Control Panel. Check the ‘Activate’ boxes for all TLDs that you wish to include in your web hosting offerings and arrange the priority order in which they will be appearing in the respective domain name fields on your store’s index and order pages. You have already set up your web hosting plans, so just make sure that the ‘FREE Domain Offer’ is disabled. Thus, when your clients order web hosting plans plus domain name registration/transfers, the price of the domain name that they select for purchasing will be included in the total price of the web hosting package.
Example 3: You'd like to sell web hosting with a free domain name included in the package:
Here is what you need to do if you've decided to offer web hosting plans with a FREE domain name. Let us remind you that the ‘FREE Domain Offer’ is valid only for our .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ and .US top-level domain extensions. You can set any of your web hosting plans to be offered with a free domain name included in the package. Simply select the desired plan and check its corresponding box - ‘FREE Domain Offer’. This way the price of the domain name will not be included in the total price of the hosting package and you will add another strong selling point to your service offerings.
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My Offers Tutorial
3.1.2 Set Prices
We'll present an example on how to set your web hosting prices. First we would like to engage your attention with the following price descriptions - retail price, minimum price, maximum price, wholesale price and profit:
Wholesale price: The wholesale price is the price at which our web hosting services will be sold to you - the web hosting reseller. These prices also cover the billing and support expenses.
Retail price: This is the calculated annual price at which you will be reselling our services. It's based on the monthly price you've set, multiplied by 12 (months).
Minimum price: We've set minimum prices for all web hosting services. You can only set a price for a particular service that is equal or above the minimum value.
Maximum price: We've also set maximum price values for the web hosting services you we'll be offering. You won't be able to set a price above these figures.
Net profit: This is your profit - the commissions, which you will be accumulating with every sale you make. The value of the hosting profit is calculated as the difference between your annual retail price and our wholesale price:
Retail price – Wholesale price = Reseller Commission
Once you've made yourself familiar with the above-explicated features, be sure to take a look at the following below example on how to set up your web hosting package prices.
In order to set the prices of your web hosting plans, please go to ‘Hosting Plans’ -> ‘Set Prices’ in your Reseller Control Panel and edit either the retail price field, or the average-per-month price field up to your preferences. Do not forget to leave disabled the ‘FREE Domain Name’ field for plans that are not going to include that offer. All plans are sold on an annual basis. The monthly price descriptions are made available to your customers for better marketing and sales results.
Example: Let's say you'd like to set a price of $5.55 per month for your Business web hosting plan with a FREE domain name offer. You can either put this value in the monthly price field, or enter $66.60 as a retail price (12 months x $5.55 = $66.60 for the whole year). You should tick then the ‘FREE Domain Offer’ box, as your offer is going to include a FREE domain name. After the one-year subscription for the particular plan has expired, your client can renew the service and if he/or she does so, you will again receive your respective reseller commission.
IMPORTANT: If you set web hosting plan/domain prices that are over 100% higher than our reseller hosting wholesale prices, you need to partially cover the billing fees and those are to be withdrawn from your reseller commission.
Back to top Set Prices Tutorial
3.1.3 Create Plans
With our unique Liquid Plan Builder tool you have the opportuinity to easily and flexibly create up to 18 custom web hosting plans entirely fitting to your and your customers’ requirements. You can offer any of them together with our pre-defined plans on your web store, thus creating bigger offerings diversity. Each web hosting plan that you create in this section must include the following services: Disk Storage, Traffic, Hosted Domains, E-mail Addresses and FTP Accounts. These services are fundamental. If you exclude even one of them, your plans won’t be competitive enough on the market. Our experience shows that plans with more than 5 GB of Disk Space and 50 GB of Monthly Traffic sell better. You can add also any of the following features – Mailing Lists, MySQL Databases, Cron Jobs, IP Addresses, SSH and Site Studio, thus creating more powerful and feature-loaded packages. All plans will include our 24/7 Support Around The Clock service without any increase in the prices. All service quotas available here will be also available to your clients (after they have purchased a hosting plan from your company) as Upgrades from their Web Hosting Control Panel.
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3.1.4 List Plans
Here you can see listed all plans that you have set up in a particular store of yours. You can compare and analyse their features (use the ‘Compare All Plans’ link) and estimate which are best to offer on your store at the particular moment. You can consider the number of clients signed up for each plan and then conclude which plans sell better. Those that are not attractive any more to your clients you can replace with any of your ‘marketing reserves’ plans (those that you’ve kept at your disposal for later activation).
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3.1.5 Upgrades
Example: If, for example, a customer of yours has used only 6 of his 12 months of web hosting with you, however he/or she has run out of disk storage (or other service quota), the customer can easily upgrade his/her account and add the needed quota. If you've set a price of $2.52 monthly fee for additional storage, the customer will be charged the amount of $15.00 for the remaining six months of his account in which he/or she will be using the storage. This means that the Upgrades’ prices are set per month and your customers will be charged only for the remaining period till the expiration of their web hosting accounts. This is valid for all service upgrades that are available to your clients from their Web Hosting Control Panels.
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3.2. Domain Pricing
3.2.1 My Offers
To activate the TLDs (top-level domain names) that you wish to make available for reselling to your clients along with your web hosting plans, you need to simply check the ‘Activate’ box corresponding to each desired top-level domain name. You can also arrange the priority order in which the TLDs will be appearing in the respective domain name fields on your store’s index and order pages. That’s it! That easy!
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3.2.2 Set Prices
When setting your domain name prices, you should keep in mind the following definitions:
Wholesale price - This is our reseller hosting network’s price. It includes all billing expenses.
Retail price – This the price at which you will be reselling the domain names to your clients for one year registration/transfer, as well as multiple years.
Minimum price - We've set a minimum price for each domain name. You cannot set a price below the minimum level.
Maximum price - We've also set a maximum price for the domain names you will be offering to your clients. You cannot set a domain name price above the maximum value.
Net profit – This is the commission that you will be accumulating with every sold domain name. It is calculated as the difference between your annual retail price and our wholesale price:
Retail price – Wholesale price = Reseller Commission
When setting the domain name pricing of a respective reseller store of yours, you should keep in mind that you can offer attractive discounts to your clients for the most popular domain names (.COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ and .US). Here you have two basic options – to offer the domains as FREE with a web hosting plan or at a discounted price. In the first case (FREE Domain Offer), the price of the domain name will be included in the web hosting plan and to your client will be presented one price for the whole package. In the second case, your client will select separately a web hosting plan and a domain name, and separate prices will be presented for each service. Apart from that, you can set different prices for sole registrations/transfers of domain names, which your customers will be able to purchase from their Web Hosting Control Panels as upgrade services.
Back to top Set Prices Tutorial
3.2.3 IDP Prices (ID Protection Prices)
You can set attractive discounts for your clients in the pricing of this service. Having in mind, for example, that the one-year pricing can vary between $9.00 and $15.00, you can set a price of $13.00 for the first year and then offer discounted prices for the following years (in the multi-year ID Protection registration), for example: 2-year registration - $25.00, 3-year registration $37.00, 4-year - $48.00, 5-year $58.00, etc. This way you will stimulate your clients to purchase muti-year registrations, as the avarage price calucalated per year will be $11.6, which is much less than $13.00! Moreover, you will receive a bigger commission – for the whole amount of years the client has ordered.
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3.2.4 List All TLDs
you can review here all TLDs’ settings and make sure that they are consistent with your customer targeting concept. You can select ‘ALL’ TLDs from the ‘Display TLD’ dropdown and analyze/compare their pricing details for multiple years. If you find it necessary, edit some prices (from the ‘Set Prices’ section), or enable TLDs for offering (that had been disabled) that you consider now more marketable. You can also review your TLDs’ pricing in all supported currencies and correct some figures, if you need to better adjust the numbers to your customers’ residential location.
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3.2.5 TLD Pricing
This section will always contain up-to-date information on the wholesale pricing of each TLD. It is your reference guide! You can, for example, view the TLDs’ price details in all supported currencies and change your store’s default currency if you find a different currency more suitable in the particular moment.
Back to top TLD Pricing Tutorial
3.2.6 TLD Info
This section will always contain up-to-date information on the main selling point of each TLD – allowed registration period, transfer support, ID Protection support, Registrar-Lock option. If you decide, for example, to offer only TLDs that have maximum registration period (1-10 years) supported (so as to offer attractive discounts to your clients), you can easily pick these TLDs from this section. Or, if for example, you are planning to build a promotional campaign of the ID Protection service, you can quickly select here all TLDs that support this service and exclude from your offerings those that do not.
Back to top TLD Info Tutorial
3.3.1 Buy Hosting Account
This Sign-up form is actually the Order form of your reseller store template integrated into your Reseller Control Panel. Here however you can pay with your reseller Wallet. This can save you a great amount of billing fees and hassle. Here you can also specify who is going to receive all system account messages (welcome email, domain/hosting account expiration messages): you – the web hosting reseller, or the client for whom you are purchasing the account. So simply resort to this section whenever you need to buy a hosting account (plus domain name) for your reseller purposes, or for reselling to a client.
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Examples
