Reseller Hosting in South Africa: Start Your Hosting Business
Turn your web design or IT practice into recurring income with reseller hosting. Here’s how to plan pricing, choose a stack, and support clients.
How reseller hosting works
You lease resources from a provider and subdivide them into client accounts under your brand, often with white-label nameservers and billing.
Choosing the right stack
- Shared reseller for small portfolios
- VPS with cPanel/WHM or DirectAdmin for control
- Cloud (e.g., AWS/Google/DigitalOcean) for scaling
Open-source panels (e.g., HestiaCP) can cut costs but require Linux admin skills. See Hosting Types for trade-offs and compare providers in Best Web Hosting in South Africa.
Pricing and packaging
Bundle domains, SSL, email, backups, and maintenance updates. Offer tiered plans (Starter/Business/Ecommerce) with clear SLAs.
Support workflows
- Ticketing and live chat during business hours
- Proactive monitoring and patching
- Educate clients on security (2FA, strong passwords)
Migration and onboarding
Use a structured playbook: inventory, backups, cPanel/hPanel transfers, email migration, DNS changes. Follow our steps in How to Move or Transfer Web Hosting.
Scaling up
As you add clients, move to VPS or cloud and consider distributed backups, staging, and RPO/RTO targets. Reassess pricing annually to maintain margins.
Tip: Focus on a niche (e.g., clinics, restaurants, NGOs) to standardise stacks and support.