Web hosting as a commodity has undergone a revolution in the last five years. The mass marketing of the web hosting ‘package’ has seen prices fall and value added features become key. Large web hosting players have done a good job in raising standards across the industry. The mass adoption of the internet by SMEs and individuals has grown the market for domains and hosted services in recent years and reseller opportunities in this market are now better than ever.

There are some pretty compelling reasons why reseller hosting is an attractive bet. Today, a full range of white-label web solutions such as domain names, hosting, email, e-commerce and unlimited broadband packages are all available at low trade prices, ready to be re-branded as a VAR's own and sold from a reseller's own web site.

The ability to brand a high quality service completely as your own is a unique and excellent business opportunity from the outset. There is much scope to develop your own hosting brand in line with your corporate identity or other offerings.

The most attractive aspect of reseller web hosting is the profit. The high profitability of web hosting is becoming common knowledge. Reseller hosting removes all the technical barriers to entering this lucrative industry. UK sale prices are healthy and good margins and the recurring fees model make hosting, a cash-rich business.

A broad web solutions market enables the reseller to create tailored services for niche markets. An important characteristic of web hosting is the excellent scalability, allowing you to model a reseller business flexibly. All the back-end processes and customer control panels are handled by the provider but the reseller retains all customer liaison and marketing themselves. A reseller leaves all the hosting technicalities to the provider and is free to concentrate on their value adds.

For the SME market in particular, resellers can easily cross-sell hosting products into existing customer bases. As the web becomes more critical for all sizes of business, the web solutions market enables resellers to capitalize on growth areas such as mobile email, collaboration and e-commerce.

While in the early years service levels could prove a headache for resellers, today’s large white label hosting providers now serve hundreds of thousands of customers. They are equipped with the infrastructure to provide quality products and excellent uptime, connectivity and technical support. Resellers benefit from all the R&D advances of the industry without the need to invest their own capital.

Hosted services are set for a genuinely exciting future. For example, growth in software as a service is brisk, as seen by the email and remote-working solutions now taking off with SMEs. A predicted mass adoption of consumer web services and the hosting of personal media like movies, photos and backups will also pose great opportunities for the reseller web host.

The next few years will surely see an acceleration of reseller activity in the web hosting market. Resellers should take full advantage of the innovation and huge investments to be made in this growth area.