Cost of Goods
Cheap web hosting that performs — The cheapest cost of goods that still leaves you a business
A shelf price you can undercut is not the same as a shelf price you can build a book of business on, and the difference is one support ticket a month.
Straight answer first
The floor for a reseller is not the cheapest shelf price — it is the point where one support ticket a month still leaves you in profit, which on our numbers means selling above roughly ten times your cost of goods, not above it by a dollar.
Cheap hosting resold at a thin margin is the most reliable way to build a business that gets busier without getting richer. The sections below put actual figures against that: what the goods cost, what an hour of your time does to the sum, what the client experiences at the bottom of the market, and two pricing shapes that hold up.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 24 August 2026
NVMe
Included at every price point
Free
Domain on annual orders
99.9%
Target on every account
Flat
Wholesale price at renewal
Every reseller does this arithmetic once, usually late, usually after the twentieth account. The instinct is to price against the cheapest host the client could have found on their own. The correction is to price against your own hourly rate, because that is the input that actually varies.
The published figures underneath everything here: Launch at $2.42/mo, Pro at $4.66/mo, Elite at $7.08/mo, and reseller plans at $14.99, $29.99 and $59.99 a month with $0.40 per active user on top. Nothing in this trade is expensive at the wholesale end. That is exactly why the retail end has to be decided on something other than cost.
Where the floor actually sits
Run the sum properly. Reseller 1 is $14.99/mo plus $0.40 per active user, so twenty client accounts costs you $22.99 a month all in — about $1.15 per account. Fifty accounts on Reseller 2 at $29.99/mo works out at $49.99, or a dollar an account. The wholesale cost per client is small and it gets smaller as you grow, which is the good news and also the trap.
The trap is that at a dollar an account, a retail price of five dollars looks like a 400% margin, and it is — until the client sends one email. Twenty minutes of your attention at any professional hourly rate wipes out several months of that margin in a single sitting.
So the floor is set by expected support volume, not by cost. A brochure site with a client who never logs in can be carried at a low price indefinitely. A client who emails weekly cannot be carried at any price you would be comfortable advertising. Sort your prospects by that variable before you sort them by anything else.
The hour that eats the margin
Measure your own tickets for one month and the answer stops being theoretical. Most resellers find the distribution is brutally uneven: seventy per cent of accounts generate almost nothing, and a handful generate nearly all of it. That handful is not usually the biggest sites. It is usually the least technical clients, on the smallest plans, paying the least.
The fix is not to fire them. The fix is to price the tier they belong in honestly and to remove the causes. Free SSL that reissues itself removes the certificate ticket. Daily backups with a restore the client can run removes the panicked one. Softaculous with 240+ applications removes the install request. Each of those is a ticket you never receive rather than a ticket you answer quickly.
Overselling is enabled from the start on reseller plans, and it is worth being precise about what that buys you commercially: it lets you advertise packages whose stated limits exceed your own allotment, on the sound assumption that most accounts use a fraction of what they are sold. It is a pricing tool. It does not create disk, and a book of business that would genuinely fill its own allowances at once is a book that needs the next plan up.
What cheap feels like at the client end
Your client will never see your wholesale invoice, but they will feel every corner cut on the way to it. The tell-tale signs at the bottom of this market are the ones that arrive in your inbox: a site that is quick at nine in the morning and treacle at nine at night, a certificate that lapses because nobody automated it, and a support desk whose scope stops at 'the server responds to ping'.
The specifications that stop those calls are not premium features here. NVMe is on every shelf rather than a top-tier upsell, LiteSpeed runs at the server rather than being bolted on by a plugin, and the free certificate is issued the moment a domain points at the account and reissued before it lapses. You are buying the absence of tickets.
There is also the refund question, which resellers ask less often than they should. The window is 30 days on shared, business, WordPress and WooCommerce hosting, and 7 days on reseller. VPS and dedicated servers are provisioned to order and sit outside it. Knowing that precisely is worth more to you than to any of your clients, because you are the one who has to make the promise in the first place.
Two pricing shapes that survive clients
The first is flat-rate care. One monthly figure covering hosting, updates, backups and an allowance of small changes, with anything beyond quoted separately. The commonly quoted band is £15–30 a month. It works because it is simple, because clients can budget it, and because the allowance gives you a polite mechanism for saying no.
The second is tiered by answerability rather than by resources. Bronze gets the account and a 48-hour reply; silver adds updates and monitoring; gold adds same-day response and a change allowance. The underlying package can be identical across all three — you are selling attention, and attention is the thing that genuinely costs you money.
What does not work is per-gigabyte pricing. It invites the client to compare you with the cheapest shelf on the internet, on the one axis where you can never win and where the difference is a few dollars a year to both of you. Never let the conversation land there.
The wholesale price you can quote against
You publish your retail prices annually. A supplier whose renewal figure differs from its order figure quietly takes the difference out of your margin in month thirteen, on a price you have already committed to in writing. Ours do not move.
Setup is free on reseller plans, so opening the account and testing the whole workflow costs you nothing before your first client exists.
- $0.40 per active user, published rather than negotiated
- Overselling enabled from the first day
- Free setup, so testing the workflow costs nothing
- A wholesale price that reads the same at renewal
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
About a dollar per account at scale
Reseller 2 at $29.99/mo plus $0.40 per active user works out near a dollar a client across fifty accounts.
Tickets you never receive
Self-reissuing SSL, daily backups with client-run restores and 240+ one-click installs each remove a recurring support request.
Overselling from day one
Advertise realistic package limits above your own allotment, because most accounts never approach what they were sold.
NVMe on every shelf
The disk generation is not an upsell tier here, which matters because slow storage arrives in your inbox rather than in a benchmark.
A refund window you can quote exactly
30 days on shared, business, WordPress and WooCommerce; 7 days on reseller; VPS and dedicated servers excluded as built to order.
Free setup on reseller plans
Nothing to pay before you start, so the whole workflow can be tested before a single client is billed.
Price Tags Compared
How we compare with the household names
Typical sign-up and renewal prices across the market, set next to ours — the second number most comparison charts leave off.
| Line item | Hosting SellerBest seller | Typical big-brand host | Typical budget host | Typical loss-leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Price at renewal / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Renewal price on the entry plan is unchanged | ||||
| SSL on every plan | ||||
| Site migration included | ||||
| The entry plan uses NVMe storage | ||||
| Entry plan gets a backup daily | ||||
| Live human support, 24/7 |
*The number in our column is the cheapest plan on our shelf, priced on an annual term and pulled live from the very catalogue that feeds the pricing page, so it cannot drift out of date. Other columns show the ranges shared hosting tends to advertise inside each bracket: introductory rates that normally ask for a one-to-four-year commitment, then climb once that term expires. Naming individual competitors and printing their prices is something we have stopped doing. A figure we cannot re-check on the day you read it has no business sitting in front of you. So compare us with whoever you are genuinely weighing up, and read the renewal line first. That line tells you more than the headline ever will.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Measure your ticket distribution for a month
Log every client contact and its length. The shape of that data, not the shelf price, tells you where your floor actually is.
- 2
Work out cost per account at your real headcount
Plan fee plus $0.40 per active user divided by accounts — then multiply by ten before you consider it a retail price.
- 3
Remove the three recurring tickets
Automatic SSL, client-run restores and one-click installs kill the most common requests before they are made.
- 4
Sell attention, not gigabytes
Tier on response time and change allowance so the client never has grounds to compare you against a shelf price on the internet.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Cost per account calculated at your actual client headcount
- A retail price set from your hourly rate, not from wholesale
- Overselling limits chosen deliberately, not left at default
- Free SSL issuing automatically on every account
- Daily backups with restores the client can run alone
- Softaculous available so install requests never reach you
- A written change allowance in every care plan
- The refund window quoted accurately in your own terms
- Setup fees at zero on your wholesale side
- A renewal price on your supply that matches the order price
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
What multiple of my wholesale cost should I be charging?
Ignore multiples and start from time. If a client costs you twenty minutes a month and your hour is worth £60, that client costs £20 a month to serve before hosting is considered. Wholesale at roughly a dollar an account is a rounding error next to that. The multiple people quote — eight to twelve times cost — is really a rough proxy for the labour, and it stops being useful the moment your clients differ in how much they ask of you.
Is it safe to oversell, and by how much?
Overselling is switched on from the start, and it is standard practice rather than a trick — it lets you sell a package with generous stated limits knowing that a typical brochure site uses a fraction of them. Keep an eye on the aggregate rather than the ratio: Reseller 1 gives you 30 GB of NVMe and 300 GB of bandwidth, and the number that matters is what your accounts actually consume, not what they were sold.
Do I need my own WHMCS to bill this properly?
Not at the start. Under about ten accounts a spreadsheet and standing orders will do. Past that, manual billing costs you more in missed renewals and reconciliation than the licence does — a WHMCS licence is resold here at $6.99/mo. The reseller plans are ready to wire into WHMCS billing when you get there.
What is the cheapest account I can honestly put a paying client on?
Launch at $2.42/mo carries 10 GB, one website, 500 GB of bandwidth and 25 MySQL databases, and a brochure site will not trouble any of those figures. If you are billing through your own reseller account you build the equivalent package in WHM yourself. The honest constraint is not the specification — it is whether the retail price you have set covers the support that particular client will actually use.
How do I stop a price-sensitive client from shopping around every year?
Make the comparison difficult on purpose, by selling something the shelf price does not contain: updates applied, backups verified, a named person who answers. A client comparing your retainer with a $2.42 shelf price is a client who was sold hosting rather than management. That is a positioning failure at the proposal stage, not a pricing failure at renewal.
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Build the book, keep the margin.
Reseller plans from $14.99/mo plus $0.40 per active user, overselling enabled, setup free, and a wholesale price that stays put.
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