The 2nd of April has always been special for us at ResellersPanel, as it marks our birthday.

Over the years, we’ve shared a lot about how our company grew from a small startup to what we are today. For our 18th birthday, we want to share with you the story of how everything started.

The story of ResellersPanel goes back to 1999.

A group of 4 friends wanted to start their own business online. Getting a bank loan was a problem though, as banks at that time were not that willing to invest in web-only projects.

So they had to resort to getting a cash loan of $50.000 at a hefty 10% monthly interest as their starting capital.

This loan was used to finance multiple web startups, based around offering free hosting services.

With hard work and with some luck on their side, they managed to return all the money in just 13 months. However, the rush to cover the loan left its mark on our team and they felt that there is too much effort required to continue operating as a free hosting services provider, while the return of the investment was not nearly enough.

However, while working on these projects, our founders gained a lot of insight into the web hosting industry.

During these years, there weren’t a lot of companies offering reseller hosting, and most of them used cPanel / WHM, requiring a hefty monthly fee, no matter if you had customers or not.

So, when their latest project failed in 2002, they decided to start something different – a reseller hosting company, called ResellersPanel.

The team consisted of just 4 people, who had a starting capital of $4.000 in the bank and $5.000 in credits with a data center in California.

This project was instantly successful and in just a year, the team grew from 4 to more than 30 people!

However, this growth in personnel, while necessary, put a lot of strain on our bank account – in 2004 we had around $11.000 in our account, with which we had to cover all monthly expenses.

This is when our resellers started really picking up the tab and selling like crazy, which allowed us to not only keep the business but also grow it!

In the following years, thanks to you, our partners, we managed to invest more and more into the development of our tools – we built new reseller templates, a better hosting control panel, we improved the reseller control panel, we created an amazing server cluster platform…

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Asked about the secret of the success, our long-time CEO had this to say:

The secret of success in business is to have smart(er) people working for you. When you have smart(er) employees that you can trust, you can take a step back and watch the business grow, without having to do much.