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Be your own ISP

Posted on 24 Sep 2002 at 12:53

This starter option is only really useful for access, uploading and amending the websites you've designed as an all-under-one-roof service to your clients. If you want to offer your clients FTP access to their own web space, proper email accounts and a full range of space/bandwidth options, you need to farm out your ISP requirements.

The reseller route
It's ironic that the next stage on from sharing your own space - and the control that gives you over what goes where - is virtually no control whatsoever. This option is the obvious next step for the budding ISP and involves selling existing accounts from the range offered by another company. This is still useful for the web designer, but more so if you don't want to get involved in the hands-on setting-up stage.
Essentially, you'll be offering your clients whatever the ISP you choose offers with its hosting accounts. Your clients will often get FTP access and a control panel to play with, and you as an agent will receive commission or a discount on each account sold. As far as technical involvement goes, there isn't any - you simply need to find a suitable ISP like Virtual Internet or 9NetAvenue and sign up.
Each time you have a new client, you either email the ISP or go online and enter the client's details into a form; the rest is done for you. You're still the first line of help for your clients - this is what you get paid commission for - but the client will access the ISP concerned directly for services such as email and web hosting. Your financial outlay is pretty much zero, and you can be sure your clients will get the web space and bandwidth they pay for without any worries about subletting your own space.
On the other hand, profit potential is limited and you certainly can't pretend to be a service provider yourself, because everything will be branded for the company you've chosen to resell for. For the entrepreneurial budding ISP, you'll need far more control and a lot less profile from your provider. What you need is stage three - the professional reseller plan.
You may wonder why, having come this far along the road to being your own ISP, we're still talking about being a reseller. Well, that's because there's little point spending money on a near-empty server sitting in a rack somewhere until you need to, particularly when you can use someone else's server with few drawbacks. You can let your provider have the headache of backups, maintenance, hardware and software upgrades, server setup and configuration. Hopefully, you're also able to rely upon their financial clout and technical experience to provide a professional service and shield you from the pain of ownership.
You'll want your own server one day - it's an obvious progression - and there are a couple of important pointers we'll come to later that will tell you when it's time to move up. But don't forget this is a virtual world, you can hire out bits of someone else's server and get used to that first - it makes excellent sense.
Not all virtual ISP reseller schemes are the same, of course. Some offer a finite number of accounts you can create on their server for a set monthly fee, most have a space limitation and many have a bandwidth cut-off point.
Most professional reseller schemes allow you to control the account creations via a control panel, and delegate space and email accounts in the quantities you require for each client. You decide how much you'll charge when it comes to reselling these features, and for all intents and purposes the end user deals directly with you and you're the ISP. You can usually specify your own branding on user control panels as well. This means that even when you give clients direct access to their accounts, they'll still only see your name.