Flipping Web Sites -- How To Turn Them Over To Buyers

I live in the Phoenix, AZ, area, home of the largest specialty auto auction in the world -- held by Barrett Jackson Auto Auction in Scottsdale, AZ, every January.

People come from all over the world, and bring their cars in to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Lots of celebs, like movie stars and starlets; people of notariety like kings, queens, princesses; and even "average Joe's" show up at this event.

If you're a customer in the market for one of these cars, a natural question would be: "how do I get my car back to Boston / Chicago / Milan / London / Berlin after I win it at auction?"

Do you think that is a responsibility of the person you bought the car from? Or of Barrett Jackson? Or somebody else?

No! It is YOUR responsibility, as the new car owner. Barrett Jackson helps to the extent that they allow auto transporters to hang around during the week and contract with buyers to haul their new purchases away. After all, most of them had to be hauled in, so it makes sense that most will need to be hauled out again.

They even let buyers leave their newly acquired gems there on-site for up to one week while they arrange for transport. Isn't that cool of them? :)

What are you paying for your web hosting? Maybe it's $5-$10 a month for an account that lets you have some subdomains and add-on domains to the one primary domain on the account.

For a little more, say $25/mo or so, you can get a "reseller" account that gives you access to a WHM control panel (in cPanel) where you can set up a bunch of these single-domain accounts. You can say how many subdomains, add-on domains, databases, mailboxes, and GB of transfer each account gets.

Just about every hosting provider offers reseller accounts. However, when it comes to flipping web sites, you should use a vanilla cPanel hosting platform for hosting sites you want to sell. cPanel is the most generic and well-known control panel in the world.

It happens that many large hosting outfits, like GoDaddy, have their own custom control panels. They do that so they don't have to pay royalties to the folks who sell cPanel software. But it's best to stick with a generic as there will be the fewest problems.

The idea here is to set up a separate account on a domain for each site you want to host. You can do that two ways:

(1) by setting up multiple $5/mo accounts; or

(2) set up an unlimited number under one $25 reseller acct.

You can do it one way or the other and keep your life simple. But putting multiple sites on a single hosting account will make your life miserable when it comes time to sell ANY of the sites.

Think for a moment about selling a car: you sign a piece of paper and hand over the keys. That's it. What they do at that point is all on their shoulders.

When someone buys a web site from you, the process is just as simple (in theory):

(1) have them set up an account on the registrar where you have your domain registered, then "push" the domain to them.

(2) send them an email with the login info for the hosting account where the site is hosted.

That's it!

Notice that if you have the domain registered somewhere that doesn't make it easy to "push" domains to another user, that's a problem.

And if you have the site hosted as an "add-on" domain under as single-user account, that's also a problem.

Either of these situations will cause YOU more work. You don't want that, do you?

WHAT ARE MY OPTIONS?

One option is to talk to your current host and see if they have a reseller plan. If they do (and they probably do), ask if they'll transfer some of your add-on sites into separate accounts if you upgrade. They may, they may not. Honestly, it's pretty easy to do that if everything is on the same server, and they can do it in a few minutes.

If they won't, then you should get a reseller acct somewhere else that's a little more helpful, then hire someone to do it for you and get it taken care of ASAP. (Some hosts will even transfer your sites over for you for free if you ask!)

One thing you'll notice in many auctions selling templates, domains, and even complete sites, the seller makes one year of hosting at some reasonable price a mandatory part of the purchase. It's often at around $10/mo or a $100/yr buy-out. You can NOT do that unless you have a reseller account!

Again, the whole point of reseller accounts is that they let you set up sites that have their own separate login and resource limitations. You do not need "unlimited" resources to host a wordpress blog. Just 500 MB of storage, 1GB of monthly transfer, a couple of databases, a few mailboxes, and you're ready to go. A typical reseller account can accomodate hundreds of accounts of this size! All for a mere $25/mo or so.

Look at it this way: it's paying for itself if you've only got three sales at $10/mo!

So stop trying to pinch pennies with a crazy one-domain single-login account for $5/mo and step up to a "real" reseller account! It'll more than pay for itself in the long-run!

Let me tell you a little story. There's a place in Amarillo, TX, that gives away an "unlimited" portion of steak for free! REALLY!

What they do is serve up a 72 oz hunk of Top Sirloin meat cooked to your liking, along with potatoes, salad, cornbread, and a drink. And the best part is ... it's totally FREE -- IF you can consume it within 60 minutes. You can even have MORE if you want!

If not, well, it's close to $100 for the meal. They've had nearly 50,000 people try to get a free meal over the years, but only 8,000 have succeeded. Do you think they're worried about losing their shirts on this deal?

Lots of hosting places advertise "unlimited" resources on cheap accounts these days. That's a sucker's bet. First of all, it's really NOT "unlimited"! You're welcome to consume as much of their resources as you like, as long as you don't impact other users on the server.

If you read their Terms Of Service, you'll notice a little clause buried deep inside some sub-sub-sub-paragraph that they have the right to terminate your account if you consume what they consider to be "excessive" resources!

If there are 1000 of these "unlimited" accounts hosted on one physical server (a reasonable number given today's hardware), then what constitutes "excessive" is maybe 1% of any given resource. We're talking 1% of total disk space, or 1% of total available bandwidth, or 1% of any other limited resource on the box.

Now, one percent of total resources might not seem like a lot to you, but if you're one of a thousand people, that means that only 100 of you can consume 1% of the resources without locking the other 900 out of the server.

Wanna know WHY your "unlimited" account is so sluggish sometimes? Ask the ones consuming near their 1% limit!

Most hosts usually put reseller accounts on separate servers, and they don't put as many of them. They might put only 200 reseller accounts on a given server where they'd normally put 1000 regular accounts. Why? Because Reseller accounts create MORE accounts.

And you'll NEVER find reseller accounts that offer "unlimited" resources. In fact, you'll frequently see reseller accounts offered in tiers, giving you increasing resource limits.

There is no such thing as "unlimited" anything!