With more and more people now turning to the Internet as an additional source of income, it's perhaps not surprising that this is one of the biggest growth areas in business today, online or off. The beauty of it is that it can either be approached as a hobby, or seen as a way to bring in some extra money for vacations, etc, or it can be viewed as a full-time business. This second option can offer you tremendous extra income, if you know how to approach it and what works best. One particularly profitable way is as a web host reseller.

Since web hosting is such a huge area today, worth almost 120 billion dollars and growing fast, becoming a reseller for these services can soon begin to pay dividends if you're willing to take it seriously and put the work in. This is one of the more popular options for both you and the web hosting service; you can get paid for selling their services while not having to worry about the actual maintenance duties of being a web host yourself, and the host can concentrate on making their services better while other people sell it for them.

The good thing about this approach is that you have a choice as to how you proceed – you can either lease the server, rent it or buy it outright. There are plusses and minuses to both these approaches – if you do buy then you will have a lot more leeway as to how the servers are set up, whereas if you lease or rent, you're governed by the parent web host.

Once you've teamed up with a web host and you've decided to become a reseller, you need to figure out what it is exactly that you're going to sell. After all, this is where the money's going to come from that made you decide to take this project up in the first place – choose the wrong option, and you could find it costing you money as opposed to making you money.

If your web host has an existing reseller plan, this will make it all the more easy for you to succeed. Not only will they be able to offer you a good monthly package, but the profits will have the potential for being far higher than those web hosts that don't have resell facilities already up and running. For example, if you pay a web host $30 per month to use their site for reselling, and then charge your own customers as little a $5 per month, you only need six customers to pay for the account. Any on top of that (and these can run into the thousands, remember) is pure profit.

Like any business, before you start web host reselling, just take a little time to come up with a business plan, and if it seems really strong on paper, and you work out all the pros and cons and understand them before starting, your chances of success will increase greatly.