This is a great little guide, thank you.

My one problem with it is you recommend reselling hosting to make money. There at 1000’s of people out there that do this already and 99% of them (in my experience) do not do it well. The reason? Support. Supporting your hosting clients will take up too much time for it to be worthwhile and you won’t provide a decent level of support to your customers. It can spoil a decent reputation.

So I emplore freelancers out there - don’t add to the 1000’s of terrible hosting resellers out there by adding your hosting services to the pile, unless you a) know a lot more about hosting and running websites than your customers and b) don’t plan to sleep any more so you can provide the 24 hour support your worldwide customers will probably need.

That’s a fair point Andrew, I must admit my experiences with reselling hosting weren’t much fun. I’ll update the guide to give a warning to freelancers considering it to be cautious, thanks for the feedback!

Just to let you know Collis, the link to zazzle on page 2 in the right margin under the screen grab doesn’t work - produces and error on their site (at least at this moment in time).

As for hosting, I offer hosting to my clients for this simple fact, some of my clients have rather stagnant sites, lawyers, accountants etc plus some have CMS so my work on those is very limited for an ongoing income that is. In these cases, when you charge for hosting and maintenance which includes being the middle guy between them and the hosting company plus monthly backups etc, gives me the opportunity to earn my highest net profits of anything I do. I may just be lucky with the hosting company I chose which I’m not going to advertise as this is not what I was trying to do.

Basically I agree with the point that if you are looking to set up a separate website offering hosting under a reseller account then yes, you will need to be well prepared, but offering the same services to existing and new clients is an opportunity I would personally not give up. I have found that clients are well prepared to place email and website hosting services, with support, into the hands of the web designer / web master / guy that updates the website and pay a lot more than they would normally, simply for reassurance purposes, and the fact that one invoice comes in every 3 months for everything “web related”.

As a simple rule of thumb for anyone thinking of getting into this, my pricing structure was simple - customer 1 pays for the reseller account - anything after that is profit - less time spent per month on any issues - has worked very well.

It’s worth thinking about.

I love the site about earning income, the CMS integration looks great. I agree with the first poster about hosting reselling. It is a no-win situation unless you have a business built around doing just that.

It is best to leave that stuff up to the professionals.

Cosigning the advice on web hosting as ‘passive’ income. To be successful in hosting as passive income you’d need appropriately priced hosted plans and a very strong partnership with an excellent hosting provider for providing support … otherwise, it can be a real headache. Also assuming you’re the middle man between the customer and the actual hosting service provider, you could experience very high stress levels if issues occur w/ the mail/web servers.

Having tools in place to allow the client to manage as much of their accounts as possible helps (email accounts, content management services, ftp account setup etc.).

As always, grate post! thanks

awesome guide.

one mistake however - the link to revver on the “Making Products” page of Part 1 is incorrect.

Thanks for the guide. Well worth the donation!

That’s an interesting site, I picked up a few ideas Thanks.

This is the best article in a while at Freelanceswitch! I think you guys sould write more about starting as a freelancer, like what things you need to start a business. Because you guys never discuss how to invest in your business to make more revenue, how can you advertise efficient, and the administrative side of freelancing. You guys should tell more about communicating with clientsand the legal things that involve at freelancing. I hope this is a good tip for you guys!

PS: Excuse me for my bad English (I’m a Dutch fan)

Wow, what a great resource. Great info. Passive income guide is great - spread the word!