How to start a reseller hosting business in South Africa

If you build websites, run an IT support business or do digital marketing, reselling hosting is one of the easiest recurring-revenue products you can add. Your customers already trust you with their site - hosting it for them too is a natural fit, and the margin is healthy because you only pay for one larger plan and split it among many customers.

Step 1: Pick a reseller plan

Plans differ in disk space, bandwidth and how many cPanel accounts you are allowed to create. Pick a plan with enough capacity for your first 10 to 15 customers - you can upgrade in minutes when you grow. The pricing on every reseller plan is shown on our pricing page and we keep it stable.

See reseller plans

Step 2: Brand it as your own

Reseller hosting includes WHM (Web Host Manager), the cPanel admin tool. WHM lets you set your own brand name, logo, support URL and white-labelled name servers (e.g. ns1.yourbrand.co.za). Your customers never see "Trinico Cloud" anywhere - they see your brand. We provide guides for setting this up.

Step 3: Set your prices

The standard market mark-up is 3x to 5x your cost. So if a starter plan costs you R1 per gigabyte to provide, sell it at R3 to R5 per gigabyte. Bundle in extras (managed updates, monthly backups, "we handle the technical bits") to justify a premium.

Step 4: Decide on billing software

You can invoice manually for the first few customers. Once you reach 10+ customers, get billing software like WHMCS, Blesta or Hostbill - they handle invoicing, recurring payments, e-mail reminders, suspending non-payers and the cPanel account creation automatically.

Step 5: Provide support

Your customers will contact you for everything from "I forgot my password" to "my e-mail is not working". Trinico Cloud handles all infrastructure-level issues for you (the server, network, hardware, cPanel itself) - you handle the customer-facing day-to-day. We are also available 24/7 if a customer issue turns out to be infrastructure related.

How much can you make?

A reseller plan that costs (for example) R500 per month split into 30 customers paying R150 each generates R4 500 per month - R54 000 per year - in recurring revenue. That is before you add design, e-mail, SSL or managed services on top. The numbers scale up linearly as you grow.

Browse reseller plans Speak to us about white-labelling