Hosting Your Website Through a Reseller

You may be aware of whether or not your hosting provider is actually a reseller of another host. A reseller is a hosting provider that is essentially selling another web host’s services under their own name or brand, usually with their own sets of features and pricing.

If you’re unsure of whether your host is a reseller of another company, you can usually find out pretty easily. Sometimes you can just ask your host, otherwise you can find out by looking up your website’s IP address at arin.net, or looking up your domain name at whoishostingthis.com. If the IP was assigned by another hosting provider as opposed to a bandwidth or Internet provider, they are likely a reseller. Hosting through a reseller is usually not a bad thing. You are still usually hosted on the same type of hardware as the parent provider’s direct customers, and usually subject to the same amount of uptime as the parent host guarantees and provides.

Resellers are often smaller startup hosting providers that are either offering hosting as a supplementary service, or trying to start up their own hosting company and establish a customer base. In fact, many large hosting providers nowadays got their start as resellers.

The quality and responsiveness of technical support with resellers varies, as with any host. With a reseller though, you may often be dealing with a smaller number of other customers and therefore get faster attention and a more direct path to someone that can help. The downside is that since resellers rarely manage their own hardware (and are sometimes even hosted on shared platforms run by their parent host), they may not be able to resolve all problems as quickly since they have to go through their main provider, and may have less control over configuration changes or problems. As a customer of the reseller, you will usually need to contact the reseller for support and billing issues.

Many consumers choose resellers as their hosting providers (though sometimes unknowingly), due to their attractive pricing for the same features that their parent host provides. Hosting through a reseller is often as reliable as hosting through a mainstream provider, and tends to be a more cost-effective option for startup businesses. Of course, as websites grow, so do their hosting needs – you may eventually decide to host with a larger provider that can accommodate those needs.