Hey Im going to open a web development site, that includes hosting with all the plans. My first question is off topic, but for web development companies, do they host it off their own website, or do they purchase from hosting sites, like bluehost.com etc.

And my second question is, a one year hosting plan is around 60-90 dollars, which is half my profit. Is there any companies that give you major discounts the more you use them? Thanks!

Hello and welcome. Firstly would you be so kind to tell us what you need in terms of space and bandwidth and other web hosting related requirements?

My first question is off topic, but for web development companies, do they host it off their own website, or do they purchase from hosting sites, like bluehost.com etc.

For most of them I think it makes more economic sense to use a reseller account to host their customers' sites, rather than buy a separate shared hosting account for each user.

Is there any companies that give you major discounts the more you use them?

There are companies that will do such via some sort of "reseller program".

wow thanks that reseller thing helped me. Host gator seems pretty good, so I might go with them. How many websites do you think could run smoothly with disk space:24gb and bandwidth:250gb. (Sites would conatin 2 to 10 pages each).

(Sites would conatin 2 to 10 pages each).

If those are pure HTML based sites, then there would be something like 50-100KB per page. Say each site uses up 1MB on average, but you have to give them some email space etc.

I wouldn't go under 50MB per account, though that's just me. That would mean that you could fit some 480 accounts in that space -- in theory.

If you plan to use some sort of CMS, things get more complicated, and usage higher.

No one can estimate data transfer usage accurately, as no one can predict how much traffic the hosted websites will get.

In any case, provided that your customers don't really care about the space that you give them as long as their sites run fine and don't have to lure them with figures they'll never get to use, a reseller account will be much more cost effective and less wasteful than buying individual shared hosting accounts.

Having all your customers on the same server is a risk though (the keeping all your eggs in the same basket theory). The least you can do is have recent full backups. Bad things can always happen, and data once lost cannot be conjured up.

I assume you need to get started first of all and then move and do ugrades for your existing account as you go. I assume that is not vise at least to pay for the tons resources which you are not using and be over billed

You may try Pay-as- you-go model in reselling.
A shared plan is the simplest way to go, but once you have plenty of clients and server management skills, a dedicated server will be the best option. In this case as icdc has said above backups will be the must.

On the shared web hosting you will never have permission from the main web hosting company to resell the sources of account.
Reseller accounts were designed for these needs

And my second question is, a one year hosting plan is around 60-90 dollars, which is half my profit. Is there any companies that give you major discounts the more you use them? Thanks!

It seems that espinda.com has been offering whole year for $7 dollars. I have seen they have special according that. I think that is quite cheap and you can get in touch with them and specify all details