GoDaddy Reseller Review

Update as of 9/15/10: GoDaddy, since finishing their grid beta, is a terrible place to host your site. If you want to sell garbage to strangers, you might consider this program, but I can’t in good conscience continue testing the reseller program.

Click below to see the specifics from GoDaddy’s reseller program:

Overview: So here’s the deal.  I never really expected to run this test, but from looking at my statistics, there are a lot of people interested in becoming resellers.  I’m not one of them, but as I looked over the reseller program at GoDaddy, I decided that it was worth a good look.  For one thing, I could do it for $199, which is a solid price for such a thing, and also it is very easy to use, so it won’t take up too much of my already strained time.

Here’s another deal, though.  Because of my contract with GoDaddy, I can’t acknowledge my own site here.  This is rather frustrating because it would be more helpful to you if you could go take a look, but there is a way around it, as you will see in the “Set up and Maintenance” section.

Also, I’ve had to develop a new rating system that is more appropriate to being a reseller. I should point out, however, that I DO NOT intend to try any other reseller programs at this time, so this is comparing GoDaddy to my expectations rather than to other programs.

Reseller Plans:
Pricing:
Set up and Maintenance:
Product Selection:
Consumer Pricing:
Client Customer Service:
Marketing and Earnings Potential:
Overall:

Reseller Plans:  

  There’s really not more you could want here.  The basic reseller plan is $99.99 per year and might include everything you need.  What you don’t get on this plan is the ability to sell your own reseller plans, “the best buy rates in the industry,” and earning PPC money off of clients’ parked domains.  I’m not sure what “the best buy rates in the industry” means, but at the time that I was setting up my account, I assumed that meant I would get better pricing with a higher priced plan, so I picked the middle plan, the Pro Reseller.  With that, all I can’t do is sell reseller accounts.  The cost for this middle plan is a reasonable $199.99 per year.  The highest level, the Super Reseller plan, adds the ability to sell reseller services to your customers.  Since it doesn’t seem to add “downstream” income to sell reseller plans, in other words, you don’t get a share of what they sell, I decided I wasn’t all that interested in it at this time.  I can see that once your reselling account becomes successful, that you may want to add this ability and offer it to your customers.

Pricing:  

GoDaddy is as inexpensive, or more so, than the other resellers I checked. One thing to note here, though, is that you can’t pay monthly, but if you are that cash strapped, you shouldn’t be getting into reseller hosting at this time. It is not a “quick fix” for money problems, and you will likely have to spend more money to make money down the road (see Marketing and Earnings Potential section).

Set up and Maintenance:  

Not sure I’ve ever done anything as easily as I set up my account. I paid and had a site. From there, I was easily able to redirect it to a domain name that I owned, played with the colors using their design wizard, and added a custom header. Then I went through and made sure I was offering all the products I wanted to offer, and that the prices were where I wanted them. You can go in and select various sales and promotions if you like. It’s all very simple and intuitive. Maintenance is nothing unless you want to run sales and such.

So what sort of site do you get for money? Well, since I can’t link there due to the terms of the agreement, let me describe it to you. It’s easy to do. The site looks exactly like GoDaddy.com with regular models instead of celebrities. Change the colors a bit with the design wizard and add your own header, and you have a very, very professional looking site that will inspire confidence in your customers.

Consumer Product Selection:  

Very, very robust. Essentially, you are offering everything that GoDaddy offers with a couple of minor exceptions. Their newest products are a special WordPress hosting and grid hosting. I don’t know if you can’t offer them because they are new or if they don’t intend to ever let you offer them. I will call them later to clarify. Still, you can offer three levels of shared hosting. VPS and dedicated hosting. And you also have something called blogburst hosting. Obviously, you can sell domains, and there are a lot of add-ons that customers can purchase. It’s a full range of products that dwarfs many “one-size-fits-all” companies.

Consumer Pricing:  

The prices your customers pay are very good. In fact, on the lowest hosting plan, you are actually cheaper, if you want to be, than GoDaddy themselves, as you are on the blogcast hosting. You won’t compete very well with GoDaddy on domains, but you can come in lower than most providers. VPS hosting starts at just $29.99 per month. Your customers are going to feel as though they are getting a good deal, and really they are.

Client Customer Service:  

  This is really sweet.  You have the option to handle customer service yourself (why, oh why, would anyone ever do that?) or you can let GoDaddy do it for you.  You get your own phone number so that their 24/7 support team can identify what host the customer is calling from.  You can add your own logos to the support tickets.  Basically, your customer gets the benefit of GoDaddy’s customer support without ever realizing they are working with GoDaddy, and you never even realize that they’ve had a problem.  Most resellers leave your customers to you, but not GoDaddy.  If you can think of a better solution than this, I’d like to hear about it.

Marketing and Earnings Potential:  

  This non-rating has nothing to do with GoDaddy.  I would rate all resellers the same.  GoDaddy has many resellers earning 5 figures per month, but to do that isn’t easy.  Pay $199 and leave and you’ll earn nothing.  You are going to have to market your site, and probably not in the usual ways.  This is a very crowded market.  Go to Google and type in anything useful for website hosting, and you’ll see all the usual people come up.  You will never surpass GoDaddy or Bluehost or HostGator, etc. in the search engines, so you have to take another path.  One useful method might be to try to secure a domain name that is distinctive yet will still get traffic for hosting.  For instance, if you live in Atlanta, you could use variations of AtlantaHost.com until you find one that isn’t taken.

The other thing you are probably going to have to resign yourself to, and I will post more on this as I get more experience with my reseller account, is that you may well have to pay for advertising, for instance through Google Adwords.  That way, you get to put yourself at the top of search engine results, just for a price.

Done right, the earnings potential is staggering, but it won’t be easy.

Overall:  

  I did my research and picked GoDaddy.  I would have never tried this as a review topic had I not had confidence in GoDaddy and their set-up.  I’ll keep you updated as I go along.

Click below to take a look at GoDaddy’s reseller program:

UPDATE: Go here for my first monthly update of how I am doing with my GoDaddy Reseller Account.