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How to stop reselling someone else’s cloud bill, take back control of your margin and turn cloud into a profit engine.
to protect your cloud margin
to turn cloud into a profit engine
Most managed service providers (MSPs) remember when margins were healthy. On-premise work paid well, and you owned the relationship end to end. Then the industry moved everything to the public cloud on the promise it would be cheaper and simpler to manage. For a lot of partners, the opposite happened to their margins. The real reason isn’t the headline price of cloud. It’s that, as an Azure or AWS reseller, you became a pass-through for a bill you don’t set, priced in a currency you don’t control, while carrying all the support and billing burden underneath it.
Reselling Azure today typically returns a thin margin, often around 10%, because the pricing is public and largely fixed by your spend with Microsoft. And that already-thin number is under pressure from three directions at once.
Microsoft adjusts cloud pricing on a regular cadence. Australian cloud and on-premise prices rose around 9% in 2023. Microsoft now reviews local-currency Azure pricing against the US dollar twice a year, every February and September, so increases land on new and renewing subscriptions on a fixed schedule. Every increase comes straight out of a 10% margin and adds an awkward conversation with your end customer.
Azure and AWS are priced globally in US dollars and converted to local currency at the prevailing monthly exchange rate. Australian clients are still billed in AUD, but the amount moves month to month (foreign exchange, or FX). A soft Australian dollar inflates the bill with no change at all to what the client is actually using. Either the MSP absorbs that movement out of its own margin, or it passes a different number to the client every month. Both are bad: one erodes margin, the other creates a recurring billing headache and a client who can never budget.
The hyperscalers carry so many SKUs that, as our own team puts it, you almost need a rocket-science degree to quote a solution accurately. Then you have to translate that complexity into a bill the client can understand, line by line, every month, with FX layered on top. That’s pre-sales time, account-management time and billing time that the 10% margin never pays for.
The bottom line: you cannot build a margin business on a bill you don’t control. Competing on the hyperscalers’ terms is a race you don’t set the rules for.
If reselling a hyperscaler bill is the problem, the answer isn’t to resell it harder. It’s to change what you’re reselling. Move your clients’ workloads onto Hosted Network Cloud and you stop passing through someone else’s variable, USD-priced invoice. Instead you resell cloud on terms that work for you: you own the client relationship, the billing and the margin, while we run the platform behind you.
Most business owners don’t care which hyperscaler logo is on the back end. They care that:
Moving a workload to Hosted Network Cloud delivers all three, and hands the margin back to you.
The real conversation: not dollars-per-virtual-machine, but a predictable monthly cost, better support and a partner who owns the outcome.
Take a client running a handful of legacy servers (a terminal server, a SQL database and a file server) on Azure for around $4,000 AUD a month, a figure that quietly drifts up and down with the exchange rate. At a typical 10% reseller margin, the MSP keeps about $400 a month, and spends real time each month reconciling the FX movement and explaining the invoice.
Move that same workload to Hosted Network Cloud and the MSP buys it wholesale at a fixed AUD rate. The partner can hold the client’s price at $4,000 and capture a 30% to 40% margin, roughly $1,400 a month. That’s about $1,000 more margin a month on a single client, the bill no longer moves with the dollar, and the reconciliation work disappears. Or, if the partner chooses, they can pass some of the saving on: bill the client less and still earn more than they did on Azure. The client wins, and the MSP looks like the hero.
Same workload, two very different bills. What the partner does with the $1,157.00-a-month gap is where the margin story is won:
Whichever way the partner plays it, the bill stops moving with the dollar and the monthly FX reconciliation disappears. The client gets predictability; the MSP gets margin it controls.
Hyperscaler pricing is external; you can’t influence it. Margin control is internal. Here are the four levers you do control once a workload sits with Hosted Network.
Because Hosted Network is the wholesaler and owns the platform, there’s no Microsoft or AWS price tag baked in.
Partners typically see 30% to 40% margin on Hosted Network Cloud versus around 10% on Azure resell. And you don’t have to drop the client’s price to win the deal. Hold their existing rate and bring the difference straight back into the business, or pass some of the saving on as a competitive edge. Your call, not Microsoft’s.
When workloads sit with Hosted Network, free standard support plus 24×7 emergency support is included at no extra cost, and partners deal directly with our team. Veeam-powered backups give complete control over recovery points, down to 15 minutes, all backed by the same support team.
On Azure or AWS, that level of support is a paid premium, or a queue you wait in. That’s both a cost you remove and a service quality you can stand behind in front of your client.
Hosted Network pricing is a fixed monthly fee in AUD. What a client signs up for today is what they pay in a year, unless they add resources. That predictability removes the hidden margin leaks of hyperscaler reselling:
Cloud is a strategic control point. The MSP who owns the cloud relationship, under their billing, their brand and their managed agreement, is in a far stronger position than one reselling a hyperscaler in their client’s environment.
Hosted Network Cloud runs on MultiPortal, a platform we built ourselves and now sell globally. It powers telcos, cloud and service providers, publicly listed companies, government departments and universities across Asia, the US and Europe, and it’s a mature, proven alternative to VMware, Azure and AWS, carrying real production workloads at serious scale.
So when you move a client onto Hosted Network Cloud, you’re not reselling a thin layer over someone else’s infrastructure. You’re putting them on a platform engineered and run by the same team that backs you, with a global track record that stands up to any client’s due diligence.
What makes it easy to sell: the platform does the heavy lifting behind every one of those products.
The most common objection is risk. In practice the move is staged and low-drama.
Production status
any cloud or on-prem
copy backups across
restore + validate
final backup, full restore
workload now live with us
We copy the data across first. How long depends on the volume of data and where it’s coming from. A local Sydney-to-Sydney move is quick; pulling data from the US takes longer.
The environment is stood up so the partner can boot everything, see it running and prove to the client it works as expected.
A planned switch, treated as a maintenance window. There’s a little downtime, so set client expectations early.
The Hosted Network team is available throughout, and if the infrastructure is contracted, we’ll do the heavy lifting.
Bring us in early: we help with sizing from the start and can even join the client conversation if it helps. Timeline scales with the environment: a couple of VMs is quick; a couple of hundred is a project.
The low-hanging fruit: legacy line-of-business workloads (terminal servers, database servers, web servers and ERP platforms) and any client running large Azure workloads. These are the simplest, fastest moves, and they drive the most margin back into the business.
| Azure / AWS resell | Hosted Network Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical partner margin | ~10%, set by your spend | 30% to 40%, you set the price |
| Billing | USD-priced, variable in AUD, monthly reconciliation | Fixed monthly AUD |
| Pricing direction | Regular increases (about 9% in 2023; reviewed against the US dollar twice a year) | Wholesale, stable, no hyperscaler price tag |
| Support | Paid premium, or a queue | 24/7 included, deal direct with our team |
| Quoting | SKU sprawl, slow, error-prone | Self-serve calculator, quote in minutes |
| Data sovereignty | Global estate, USD-pegged | Four AU data centres, Australian-sovereign |
You’re the one your client trusts to recommend the right platform. You can put them on a hyperscaler’s metered, USD-priced bill that you don’t control, or on Hosted Network’s IaaS: a predictable, supported, sovereign solution where you own the relationship and keep the margin. Same workload, very different outcome for your business.
Look across your client base for the two signals that make a move worthwhile: clients running legacy line-of-business workloads (terminal servers, databases, ERPs) and clients sitting on a large Azure bill. Those are the easiest to move and where the margin swing is biggest.
The moment you spot an opportunity, loop us in. Our team sizes and designs the solution with you at no cost, helps you position it against the hyperscaler, and will join the conversation with your client whenever that helps win the deal. You can self-quote any workload in minutes with the free cloud calculator in the partner portal, but for anything more involved you’re never pitching alone.
Stand up a free proof of concept and let your client have a play with their workload running in our environment before they commit. Seeing it work firsthand is what wins the deal, and our team builds the POC at no cost.
Schedule the cutover (we’ll do the heavy lifting on contracted infrastructure), then standardise on a repeatable cloud bundle so the next deal is faster to quote and deliver. With cloud in place, it becomes the anchor for the broader four-pillar opportunity (connectivity, cloud, voice and security) for a stickier client and more revenue per account.
Rising hyperscaler prices aren’t really the problem. Reselling a bill you don’t control, at a margin you don’t set, is. MSPs who move the right workloads to a platform they own aren’t competing with the hyperscalers on price; they’re operating in a different market. The results follow:
Ready to reclaim your cloud margin? Book a margin review with our team: we’ll have the technical conversation, size it for free and stand up a proof of concept.
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