Sell hosting on your own high street

An affiliate points a customer at us and takes a cut of what we bill; the relationship and the support stay ours. A partner takes the lot: you buy capacity from us, write your own price tags, invoice your customers in your own name and answer their first questions yourself. The affiliate earns a slice without doing much. The partner runs a hosting business on our platform and keeps the whole margin. If you already build or look after sites for people, partnering nearly always pays better.

Only if you tell them. The nameservers are yours, the control panel wears your branding and the invoices come from you. One detail we would rather state plainly: the servers stand in London, so anyone who looks up where their site lives will find a UK location. That is geography rather than a leak in your branding, and in practice almost nobody checks.

Most partners arrive as freelance designers or small studios who already build sites and are tired of pointing clients somewhere else for the hosting. The technical half is friendlier than it looks: WHM creates the accounts and sets the limits, cPanel is the screen your clients have seen before, and provisioning is a form rather than a server build. What actually takes thought is what to charge and what to promise on support — and we will happily talk both through before you sign anything.

The sums are in the table above, and the short version is that earnings follow what you bundle, not how cheaply you undercut. Reselling hosting on its own at a thin markup is a small monthly trickle. Selling it inside a site-care retainer — hosting with updates, backups and a promise that someone will pick up the phone — is where partners make real money, because the charge is for the responsibility rather than the disk space. Fifteen clients on a care plan is an income. Fifteen clients on bare hosting is beer money.

Anywhere we sell badly ourselves, which is most of the map. The UK and Europe are already our strong ground. We would especially like partners across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America, where the language, the payment habits and the local trust all sit with you rather than with us. One caveat worth stating before you plan anything: the servers are in London, so latency is excellent across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, workable for the Americas and South Asia once caching is in play, and frankly poor for Australia and East Asia. Read our infrastructure page and choose your market with that in mind.

Yes, and there is no charge for it. Shifting an existing client book is the single thing that keeps people stuck with a platform they have outgrown, so we do the migrations alongside you instead of sending you a guide. Tell us what you hold and where it currently sits, and we will plan it so your clients notice nothing and your weekend stays your own.

That you answer your own customers first, market honestly, and stop short of overselling capacity to the point where your clients feel it. Your prices and your branding are not our business and we will not interfere with either. The one firm request is that you don't claim things about our infrastructure that aren't so — our reputations are tied together, and a customer promised a datacentre down the road will be cross with both of us when they find out.