A very common question among new business-savvy web companies is “Do I have to collect sales tax on my web hosting services, web design services, or other web-based products?”. This can be a tricky question for new businesses that want to play it safe, and I don’t blame them! Who wants to risk getting in trouble with the IRS or their Secretary of State. The broad and general answer is it depends, but probably not. Whether or not you need to collect sales tax on internet services varies from state to state, but I’m going to lay out the most general and applicable information below:

A VDS is a great intermediate step in-between a reseller account and a full blown Dedicated Server- it gives you the full-control root access of a dedicated service at 10-20% of the cost (I’m basing these numbers on a low-end VPS at $20 per month and a low-end Dedicated Server at $100 per month). You can absolutely bootstrap your hosting business with a Virtual Private Service- but there are some pitfalls to watch out for

Becoming a cPanel Reseller is one of the easiest ways to get started with your own webhosting company. By reselling cPanel webhosting, you let your reseller company worry about all of the technical details- Is the server running smoothly? Is the mySQL database in tip-top shape? Are there any cPanel security updates that need to be applied? You don’t have to worry about knowing the answers, all you need to concern yourself with is selling your web hosting.