Unlimited passive income, unlimited possibilities and unlimited … headaches.

Your clients need hosting. You know how it all works. They’re ready to throw their money at you. You start calculating, “If 42 clients pay $10/month minus the cost of the reseller hosting and … ”

Stop.

Want some quick advice if you’re thinking about getting into the reseller hosting business from a company who’s been doing it for 10 years? I’ll cut to the chase and save you time, money and stress:

Just Say No.

Just don’t do it. Leave the hosting to companies who have teams of call centers going 24/7 and who like getting calls about SMTP servers and increasing PHP limits.

If you do have website (or branding or marketing) clients who are looking for website hosting and you’d like to make some “easy money,” just get an affiliate account at a host (e.g. WP Engine or HostGator) and send your clients the link to sign up.

Disclaimer: I have to admit that I really enjoy making fun of the cheesy headline, “Unlimited Income Potential!” I use it as often as I can.

Here’s some math for you. Sure, $10 x 42 clients = $420/month and the reseller hosting costs, I don’t know, $50/month. Easy peasy, right? Here are some more numbers: if a tenth (say, just 4) clients call you with an issue and you have to spend 1 hour with each situation, spend a half hour with the host on chat, change some settings and then another 1.5 hours configuring some PHP code (when you can barely spell PHP and are soon ready to try PCP … ) and don’t forget the cost of therapy you’ll want to go through after 2 clients’ sites were down and they called, emailed, texted and would have come to your front door if they knew where you lived and, I’m sorry, how much profit was that per month again?

Redefine “Passive” Income

Almost none of the actions in the scenario above are “passive” unless we’re using the same definition as “passive aggressive.” Are you looking for true passive income? Send your new clients to a host that will do everything for them, answer the phone, upgrade PHP, maintain servers and do anything and everything that you don’t have to. You’ll get a one-time fee from the host that you can spend on something to celebrate all of the free time you have not figuring out how to configure the .htaccess file.