What is Reseller Hosting?

You may have come across references to the term reseller hosting in your experience managing a website. Reseller hosting is a plan that some hosts offer that allows their customers to essentially resell hosting services for a low cost.

The concept of being able to essentially start your own hosting company with little to no footwork is very appealing to those just getting started in the industry. Bandwidth and co-location costs are very high and can impede the ability to make a profit for several months or even years, and can prove to be a loss if the startup company fumbles. Therefore, it’s not surprising that some very larger hosting providers today actually got their start by becoming resellers.

When becoming a reseller, you can expect to act as the hosting provider for your clients. You will likely be responsible for the billing and technical support of your own customers (though your parent host may offer tools to assist), which means that you will need to be equipped to provide such support. Most hosts do not provide technical assistance directly to the customers of resellers, but rather require you to contact the host on the customer’s behalf.

There are caveats to being a reseller though. More often than not, the hardware and network that your clients are hosted on don’t belong to you, they belong to your host. Therefore, you may or may not have control over certain aspects of your setup. For this reason, many resellers opt for a VPS or Dedicated server so that they may at least have control over the configuration of the server, and have a higher level of access to be able to service certain requests that may otherwise be impossible on a shared server. Also, while you may have rules of your own, your customers will also be bound by the Terms of Service of your parent host.

The excellent part of reselling though is that once you’ve established your customer base, you may have the ability to proceed in setting up your own resources to officially become an independent hosting provider.