Become a Web Host Without a Reseller Account

If you've ever wanted to becoming a web host, but didn't want to pay extra just for WHM, you should read this article. After words, you should be able to set up a web host with just a shared hosting account.

Lets be honest, shared hosting accounts are a lot cheaper than reseller hosting accounts. Lets see host quack for an example. There cheapest plan, which has 10 gigs of web space and 20 gigs of bandwidth is only $1 per month, $11 a year! If you could have a reseller for that price, you would be swimming in cash, but their first reseller costs $20 a month. A pretty big difference in the price. I'm gonna show you how to use that $1 shared hosting account as a web host.

This does not include giving people FTP access, which lots of hosts will not let you. I must tell you this is good for a primitive host only, that would support html and images (although you can allow any kind of extension that you would want to), and there isn't really a way to limit web space and bandwidth, although it wouldn't be a really big problem since html sites don't take a lot of space and bandwidth.

The first thing you need is to find some simple online PHP file upload script, it's best if it shows you each file that is uploaded and lets people delete the files themselves. For every client you make one of these for them, and password protect them so that no one else could access their upload panel. Have the files be uploaded to their domain or sub domain, so when they upload a file home.html, when they typed in theirdomain.com/home.html, they would get their site.

Thats the method! It might take some time since you have to manually work, but it's the best method to use if you are cheap :P. One plus is this way you can advertise unmetered space and bandwidth without worrying about people really using unlimited. To earn, you should put ad code in their upload panel, and charge something like a one time fee of $5 to get rid of it. You could also advertise paid plans with Cpanel (you'd need a reseller for this, but could easily earn). Another thing is that you could just sell 5 buttons or links there for $3 or so per month, it would earn you well, since you would only need 1 ad to pay for your hosting :)

One last note is, you would first have to look into your hosts terms and conditions. I mentioned host quack as an example, but you would have to look through their terms to see if this is allowed by them. This method isn't used by a lot of people, so i doubt if it is banned, since they are a smaller host, but i suppose someone like host gator or anhosting would say this is against their terms. The best thing is to find a reliable small host that has been around for over a year. Hope this will help anyone with questions :D