Reseller Web Hosting Service
Reseller hosting - What is It?
Reseller hosting is a type of web hosting that gives the owner of the account the flexibility to use his or her allowed hard drive space and bandwidth to host third party websites. A reseller buys the services of the host at wholesale cost and turns around and sells these services to other customers, most likely for a profit. There is a portion of hard drive and bandwidth is set aside for the reseller account. A reseller has the option of renting a dedicated server from the hosting company or resells the shared hosting services. In the case of reselling, the reseller is really just given the authority to sell a specific amount of disk space and bandwidth to his or her own clients and doesn't have to rent a server from the web hosting company that he has a reseller account with.
One of the most common web hosting resellers are web design firms, web developers or systems integrators that offer web hosting as an additional service. Reseller hosting is also a cost effective way for entrepreneurs in the web hosting industry to start a small company. In most cases, reseller hosting plans will let resellers to make their own plans for service and determine their own structure for pricing. Much of the time, resellers can establish their own branding through customized name servers and control panels.
The beauty part or reseller hosting is that is doesn't take lots of knowledge of the technicalities of web hosting. Most of the time, a data center operator has to keep the network infrastructure and hardware maintained and the owner fo the dedicated server will secure, update and configure the server. The reseller has to interface with his or her own client base, but most of the time, hardware, software and connectivity issues will be sent to the server provider from the company that the reseller purchased the plan. Profitable reseller firms will usually have to advertise heavily to generate clients. The monthly fees for major hosts are not very much, so business is generally low margin and resellers have to allocate large amounts of money to advertising to stand up against their more established competition. Despite all this, web hosting is one of the largest online businesses because all websites have to be hosted.
Resellers have the ability to establish and manage client accounts through a web interface, Control panel, that is point and click.
Some of the better known control panels include:
- H-sphere (H-sphere)
- Webmin (Unix)
- Plesk (Windows/Unix)
- DirectAdmin
- WHM/cPanel (Unix)(Windows version coming soon)
What Is Good About Reseller Hosting?
For some, reseller hosting is a great thing. For instance, say that you are a developer or a webmaster, with reseller hosting, you can manage and host all of your sites under a single reseller account for only one price. If you were to pay your hosting provider for more than one hosting account, you would likely wind up paying much more. Plus, you can resell hosting as another feature to your current business, or you can have another business.
Private Label Reseller Hosting - What Is It?
For a reseller, private labeling allows total transparency from a parent hosting company. So, if you're a reseller and want to resell web hosting, this is valuable. If you decide to start up your own hosting company, your clients will not know that the parent hosting company even exists.
How Much Do You Need To Know About Web Hosting to Resell?
If you're going to resell, it's a good idea to have a general knowledge of web hosting terms, such as various email features, mysql, php, etc. If you don't know something, there is most often support available any time of day to help you. Often, resellers are given the technical support that goes straight to their clients as part of a plan.
What is the Reseller's Responsibility?
Resellers are responsible for handling any of the interaction between themselves and their clients. This is because the parent company only supports the direct reseller, except when end user support is part of the contract. This will include building your hosting site, setting up plans and pricing as well as any kind of third party script installations. Parent hosting providers usually provide you with resources, such as disk space, bandwidth and other features to help you deal with all of your server related problems.
References
Reseller Web Hosting Service - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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