Reseller Hosting

As such, it is important to understand the nuts and bolts of reseller hosting if you intend on capitalizing on its many benefits. This applies to both those considering using a reseller as a primary hosting provider and those interested in actually becoming a reseller of a hosting companies services - which is in line with services offered by web design firms or boutique marketing agencies.
 
Resellers divide up resources such as bandwidth and data transfer and sell pre-defined hosting packages to hosting consumers - usually with the same functionality but at a lower price than a traditional hosting company can provide. The enterprise profiting the most is the one that is leasing the server because they turn around and make it available to resellers who then must acquire individual hosting clients - putting the onus of successful selling on the reseller or the reseller's affiliate partners. If the resellers do not register people at a steady rate however, they risk going out of business, potentially jeopardizing the availability of their consumer's websites. Consumers of reseller web hosting usually do pretty well also in the results department (as long as minimal support is required) as overall costs are dramatically lower than through traditional providers.
 
If you are considering becoming a client of a hosting reseller or reselling space on anothers server, make sure to consider the following points and review information about the reseller company or the actual provider of the service.

 
Cost & Peripheral Needs
It is a given that you want to host a website but do you need additional services such as 24/7 support, domain registration, web page design or database and scripting support? If so, you should make these issues a part of your selection criteria when choosing a host. Cost is also of supreme importance for the majority of website owners and should play a significant role in the selection process - namely when it comes to comparing individual reseller providers, along with their setup and monthly charges.
 
Disk Space Requirements
Hosting providers offer packages with varying amounts of storage capacity typically presented in the form of Megabytes (MBs). If you tally the sizes of all documents, images and folders that comprise your website you will have some scope of your actual storage requirements. The only time that more space is needed or should be planned for is if you have multi-media content such as photos, videos or music that you want to make available via the web or if you have measurable growth plans and have a foreseeable need for additional space.
 
Data Transfer Needs
Just like the various storage capacities offered by web-hosting providers it is important that consumers of reseller hosting be familiar with Bandwidth and Data Transfer. These terms refer to how much data will be transferred from the web server to the browsers requesting your pages. This is typically measured in megabytes or gigabytes (MB or GB). This number is largely influenced by the popularity of your site. For example, if you have a one-page website that is 50KB in size and you get about 30,000 visits per month. 50,000 * 30.000 = 1.500.000.000 (1.5GB) of data transfers.
 
Is Reseller Hosting Right For Your Web Business?
The answer is... it depends. There are countless instances where people have been fooled by flashy websites and big promises such as unlimited storage, e-mail accounts or data transfer. These promises are usually too good to be true. There are cheap hosts that provide excellent quality and there are expensive hosts that provide shoddy service and visa versa. In many respects, selecting a host is part gamble and part common sense. Using hosting provided by a reseller is cost-effective for start-up websites however and can provide those interested in additional revenue streams the ability to do so by brokering hosting relationships.
 
Lee Evans owns and operates LeeWare Development (www.leeware.com), a premier content distribution service promoting education through technology.