What is Reseller Hosting?

If you are in the market for web hosting services and have been doing some searching on the Internet you have likely run across companies offering reseller hosting.  Many companies offer both shared hosting and reseller hosting among their "product" offerings.

To keep things simple, my main web hosting rating list reviews what is commonly called shared web hosting.  These accounts are designed for individuals or companies who have no web hosting needs beyond hosting their own websites and offer limited or no web hosting services to other individuals or companies.  They are "shared" because many web hosting accounts exist on the servers at the web hosting company.  These shared accounts are perfectly adequate for most individuals or businesses - in fact, this website is on a shared account.

So what is reseller hosting?  As its name implies, Reseller Hosting is a hosting account that allows you to purchase web hosting storage and bandwidth and "resell" that storage and bandwidth to other individuals or companies.  A typical reseller account with 4 GB storage and 60 GB bandwidth might cost $20/month.  You can turn around and host as many domains as you want and charge several individuals or companies to share that space and bandwidth you own. If you created web hosting accounts that were 50 MB storage and 750 MB bandwidth, you could sell 80 accounts in our example above.  If you just charged your customers $.50/month for that service you would have a $20/month profit.

You become, in effect, a web hosting company of sorts but the actual company does all the hard work of maintaining the servers.  Your income is limited only insofar as you can attract customers and charge them for the service.

One other thing to keep in mind is that reseller accounts are a very attractive option for people who want to host a lot of domains even if they have no aspirations to sell web hosting.  Most shared web hosting accounts, though cheaper than reseller accounts for the same storage and bandwidth, only allow you to host one domain.  Some charge $12/month extra for each domain you add so that price can add up quickly.  If you need to host many domains, reseller hosting is your best bet.

I'm in the process of researching the best reseller hosting plans and will create a rating list when time permits.  In the meantime, my research of different sites and reading of forums has led me to the conclusion that the best reseller hosting plans are offered by Site5.com.  Some offer better lower prices for barebones packages but then "a la carte" you to death for backups, billing software, and the like - all of which are important if you're serious about a reliable web hosting offering to customers.  Site5.com has it all included at extremely low prices.  They also have high uptime (exceeding 99.998%) and support tickets are consistently answered within 30 minutes.  I highly recommend them and use them for my own reseller account which I use to give away websites to christian churches and ministries.