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Be your own ISP

Posted on 24 Sep 2002 at 12:53

The costs for this type of plan are pretty much standard across the industry at around £50 per month or £500 per year, and this will give you gigabytes of space and thousands of mailboxes to resell. Individual schemes have different means of operation, but the basic idea is the same. You buy bulk facilities and sell them off as required to your clients in smaller chunks - you should be able to fit a considerable number of clients into the space you have available.
The reseller scheme is, again, ideal for the web designer and even for someone looking to brand himself as a fully fledged ISP. Some providers like Fasthosts offer dial-up and domain name registration services as well, so you really can be well on the way to providing full ISP services for your clients.
As far as technical expertise goes, there's little required to manage a reseller scheme like this. Usually, you'll only be filling in a control panel, and the provider will be creating the domain pointers and mail server settings from the information you enter for each, which is why there's often a charge per client. You might need to set up email aliases - if the user wants to forward mail received at their domain to somewhere else - but that's usually about it.
Providing your supplier is trustworthy and offers a good degree of service backup, you can appear professional to your customers, and all will be well. Sadly, what you often get isn't what you expect in terms of help and support, so a few hours spent trawling the bulletin boards of Internet host comparison services can pay real dividends. Typical examples of professional reseller plans can be found at providers like Fasthosts, WebFusion or Donhost, but make sure you compare extra costs as well as the basic fee. You'll sometimes find a £25 setup fee for each client after a number of free accounts for instance, plus special pricing for installing SSL, PHP or FrontPage extensions.
As long as you ensure you pass these extra costs on, or build them into your pricing, the sums should add up nicely. There's plenty of room for adding value and making a sensible profit in reselling ISP services. If you're a club or association, you can even pass the savings on to your existing members as a 'free' benefit.
It's surprising how many of the small ISPs advertising in Internet magazines are actually resellers of one major provider or another. Not that it matters, as your customers will be getting a good deal for their web hosting and email provision and you'll be offering a more personal service for your specific client base - a prime example of buying in bulk and adding value.
After all that, it might seem like we're done. With reseller accounts like this, you can be a bona fide virtual ISP, legitimately and cost effectively, but there are one or two important limitations. In fact, there are several reasons why you'd want to take the next step, but to explain fully we need to get a bit more technical.
Most of the virtual reseller schemes mentioned above operate in the same way: you enter account details that are used to make new name server, mail server and web server entries on your provider's server. Your clients' folders are placed where your provider's server usually places them. The rights, privileges and access are dealt with by whoever set up the server scripts that create your accounts, and you have little or no control over any of this.
This doesn't only affect control, but branding as well. Although you're supposed to be an ISP in your own right, your domain name doesn't live on your own name server. In effect, your domain and the domains of your customers are all hosted on your provider's server. If one of your customers did a 'whois' lookup (www.whois.org.uk) on their domain, instead of seeing your name servers they'd find your provider's name servers listed.