Why Have Reseller Hosting When You Don’t Resell Anything?

Many web hosting companies offer a variety of plans from basic shared hosting right on up to dedicated servers and even cloud computing services. One plan you may have noticed is something called “reseller hosting.” Just what is reseller hosting and what is it that you need to resell to use it?

It may interest you to know that there are a lot of website owners that have reseller hosting plans and never resell anything. Why? Because reseller accounts make it easier to manage our many websites. I’ll explain why that is in a moment.

First, let’s have a look at the hosting world and why the plans are set up the way they are. I’ll use HostGator plans as an example, since I’m a current customer and affiliate of theirs.

Entry level web hosting is designed to be easily affordable by anyone who wants to set up their own website or run a blog, such as WordPress, on their own domain. Small businesses are big users of these accounts because they don’t have the traffic or sophisticated web designs that demand high performance dedicated hosting servers. A small store, an independent computer tech, an insurance sales person and a restaurant can all make good use of basic web hosting.

What makes these plans attractive is that they are really inexpensive. HostGator’s “Hatchling” plan starts at $3.96 a month. It’s designed for a single domain, which is all most businesses ever need. You might think that a plan this cheap would be really limiting. In fact, you get unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. You also get a shared SSL certificate for secure transactions.

Note the term shared. The way they can offer this at such a low price is that this is shared hosting. By that I mean that you are on a server with a lot of other clients. It’s true that the server has limitations and the hosting company is offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth. It works out anyway because most small businesses don’t need more than a tiny amount of storage, processing or bandwidth. They just don’t like the idea of buying a constrained plan.

In a way, this operates something like cloud hosting in that you are sharing resources with many other users but have the perception that you have all the resources to yourself. You never really bump into other clients because your files are segregated and the server handles resource allocation automatically. If someone does start hogging the server beyond normal expectations, they’ll be asked to move on up to a private server so they don’t bog everybody else down.

The way you control your web hosting service is through a browser-based control panel. The most popular one is called cPanel. Once you get oriented to it, it’s very easy to use. You can set up your email accounts, upload and download files, install preloaded applications such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, view website statistics and error logs, and pretty much anything else you need to do.

Now, here’s where reseller hosting comes in. Say you have more than one domain. Do you need to buy a separate hosting plan for each domain? No, you can move up to the “Baby” hosting plan that lets you host unlimited domains on one account. This works, but you only have one control panel to run everything. It sure would be nice to have a separate cPanel for each domain.

That’s what reseller hosting gives you. You get another manager called WHM or Web Host Manager. This is like a super cPanel. It lets you create separate hosting accounts for each domain. That takes a matter of minutes when you get on the procedure. From then on, you can use the cPanel that is dedicated to a particular domain.

It’s called a reseller account because it is intended for web designers or companies that want to offer web hosting services themselves. Some designers have found they can make a tidy income by designing “brochure” sites for small businesses in their town that have no idea how to do it themselves. You charge so much for the site design and then so much a month to host it and update the files as needed. In some cases, you may want to let the client modify their own files. That’s why you need a separate cPanel for each account. It keeps one client from wreaking havoc on another client’s files.

As someone who owns and operates a couple of dozen small commercial websites of my own, I’ve found that it works best to treat them as separate entities with their own hosting accounts. The reseller account lets me have a separate cPanel for each domain while keeping the cost within reason. You can have as many domains and accounts on one reseller account as you like. The limitations are disk space and bandwidth. HostGator’s “Aluminum” account gives you 50 GB storage and 500 GB bandwidth. This is plenty for dozens of small sites. If you need more, then just upgrade for more resources. If you need more than 200 GB storage and 1,400 GB bandwidth, it’s time to move on up to a virtual private server or dedicated server.

So, which type of hosting works best for your business? Is the basic hosting package all you really need for now or do you want the kind of control you have with a reseller account? Learn more about all the hosting packages available from HostGator and choose what works best in your case.

The Easy Way To Host Lots Of Domains

With more and more businesses moving online, companies are finding that one domain name is no longer adequate. You may very well want an individual domain name for each product line you offer. Online marketers will definitely find themselves constructing separate web sites to be fine tuned for each type of product sold or even each demographic group being targeted. The problem then becomes how to host all those domains.

The traditional difficult and expensive hosting solution is to buy a separate hosting service for each domain you register. Even at $5 to $10 per month each, that can get expensive for smaller businesses and independent marketing people. If all you have is a few domain names and that’s all you ever expect to need, then go ahead and add hosting services at the same time you buy your domains. For only a few domains it won't get that pricey and you'll avoid paying for a large hosting account that you’ll never need.

So how can you host a dozen or more domains without breaking the bank? One approach that is often touted for this purpose is to start with a single hosting account and then purchase “add on” domain hosting. Usually for a couple of bucks a month each, the hosting service will program their servers to allow you to have an additional domain on your shared hosting service. The way this works is that a separate folder is created within your public HTML hosting space where you put the files for this extra site. It’s just like any other folder, except that the system knows to direct the visitor to those files for the “add on” domain. As you add more domains, you add more and more folders.

I’ve used this approach and, while it works, you still have only one control panel and one htaccess file to cover all domains. Frankly, I much prefer the flexibility and independence of giving each domain its own cPanel and being able to allocate storage and bandwidth quotas depending on the size and traffic for each site. You’ll really appreciate this if you need to do some experimenting during development of a brand new site and don’t want to risk affecting the operation of your existing sites.

Does this mean you need to stick with individual hosting plans for each domain to decouple them? No, not at all. The solution you want is called reseller hosting. It was intended for Internet development businesses that support many clients and want to give each of them their own separate account. With a reseller account, you can create web sites for many businesses and then let them make their own updates, confident that one customer can’t do anything to damage the site of another customer. You can also use reseller hosting to rebrand the hosting plan so you can sell hosting accounts to your customers.

The name “reseller” pretty much describes a service that is intended to be split into smaller accounts and resold at a profit. You can also keep all of the accounts for yourself and treat each web site you construct as if it were for a separate customer. The difference is that you personally maintain all the sites by logging into a separate control panel for each site. You also get a master control panel called the WHM or Web Host Manager to create, upgrade and delete all those individual sites.

Why would you want to buy something for your own use that is designed to be resold? Simple. The price is right. For instance, You can get a HostGator reseller web hosting account for $24.95 a month. That gives you 50 GB of disk space and 500 GB of bandwidth to host unlimited domains.

You read that correctly. You can host all the domains that will fit into your reseller account for $24.95 a month. Let’s say that you want to host 25 sites on your account. You can assign each site 2 GB of storage and 20 GB of monthly bandwidth. The cost spread across all sites comes to $1 per site for hosting. Just where are you going to get professional grade web hosting with free website templates, free site builder software, unlimited MySQL Databases, unlimited sub domains, and unlimited POP 3 email accounts for a buck a month per site?

With the $24.95 per month reseller hosting account, you may find that you can host dozens and dozens of small “mini sites” or affiliate marketing customized sites to support Internet sales. One beauty of this approach is that you can always add another site at a whim when a bright idea occurs. Just buy a domain name, set the name servers for that domain to the ones for your reseller hosting, and create an account for your new domain. In a matter of hours or less you can have a completely new site up and running, even in the middle the night. I know, I’ve done it many times to capture a new business opportunity that suddenly emerged.

By the way, you are not limited to 50GB disk & 500 GB bandwidth. If you need more, order a larger reseller account up to 200 GB disk & 1400 GB bandwidth for $99.95 per month. Beyond that, you may ready to move up to virtual private hosting or a completely dedicated server. All of these are available and fully explained at HostGator.

Note: Photo of server rack courtesy of William Viker on Wikimedia Commons.

Hosting Nation Offers Low Cost Web Hosting For Everyone

So, what do you want? Is it cheap web hosting? Or do you really want good web hosting cheap? If you are in the latter category, Hosting Nation has the web hosting service for you.

It wasn’t all that long ago that if you wanted to have a public website, you needed to manage your own Apache server or pay a fortune for someone else to provide the server and connection bandwidth. No more. Hosting services are a downright bargain these days. Consider that for under ten bucks a month you can have a business presence to the entire world. It’s downright amazing when you stop to think about it.

If you’ve been getting by with “free” hosting services that ruin your site design with their ugly banners, or paying $25 a month or more for “professional” hosting that only nets the providers a handsome profit, then you need to take a close look at what has to offer.

Here’s the deal. You pay $6.95 a month or $83.40 a year. With the yearly package, they’ll even waive the $25 set up fee.

This is all it’s going to cost you. What you get for that pittance is a shared hosting account that gives you 5 Gb of disk space, 50 Gb of bandwidth, 50 FTP accounts, 50 email addresses, 50 databases, 10 mailing lists, 50 parked domains and 50 subdomains.

Unless you’re running a major ecommerce site that’s giving Amazon.com a run for its money, you should find those resources more than enough. I mean, 50 databases? How busy creating data would you be keeping 50 databases engaged? For an individual site owner or a small to medium size business, these are generous resources.

Here’s another benefit that I haven’t see elsewhere. When you transfer your site to Hosting Nation, they’ll move your site for you. They’ll also give you a credit towards any hosting that remains on your current plan up to one year. Most web hosting providers deal with you at arm’s length. They’re not about to get into moving your site for you. But Hosting Nation will. Now, how’s that about helpful?

You should also know that you’re not just renting space on a server for your website. Your account also gives you access to over 80 applications, frameworks and libraries through Fantastico so you can add guestbooks, polls, links, contact forms, photo galleries, classified ads, shopping carts, a bulletin board, chatroom and blog to your site. No need to go out and buy software. These applications are yours to use on your hosting acount.

There are also real time traffic logs, data backup and recovery, plus anti-spam and anti-virus protections.

Did I mention that this hosting service is only $6.95 a month? How can you not take advantage of an offer this good? It’s so much for so little.

Well, don’t wait a minute more. Get all the details and order your Hosting For Everyone web hosting package right now.

With Hosting You Get Domains

How much would you like to pay for, say the next 3 months, to host your web sites? How about nothing?

That's right. You'll pay nothing, nil, nada, el-zippo when you take advantage of the summer 2009 promotion being run by 1&1 Web Hosting. In case that's not good enough, they'll throw in domain names for free. Still not good enough? How about business hosting for $9.99 a month? How about developer hosting for $19.99 a month? How about free software to really seal the deal?

Free software? What kind of free software?

It's the software you need to build and promote your website. Even the simplest beginner hosting plan, which goes for a measly $3.99 a month by the way, gives you the online 1&1 WebsiteBuilder. If what you want is a good looking Web site really fast, then you'll be up and running within the hour with your own content.

Upgrade to the family and hobby site plan that runs $4.99 a month and you'll get a CD ROM of specialized software that includes photo editing, GIF animation, site submission and ranking, and FTP for uploading files to the server.

Now, upgrade to the business hosting or developer hosting plans and, in addition to the jaw dropping amount of storage and bandwidth that come with these services, you'll get a premium software suite with Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0, Adobe GoLive CS2 for website design plus the software included with the family and hobby site plan.

Oh, you thought you had to go out and spend a fortune for those programs so you could design a really professional website? Put your money back in your pocket. You can get your hosting package, domain names, and design software for less than what you were going to spend on software packages.

So, how about those domains? With 1&1 hosting packages you get at least 1 domain included. You don't have to pay registration or renewal fees as long as you keep your hosting. The beginner package comes with 1 domain, which is about all a beginner should be attempting anyway. The home and hobby hosting offers 2 domain names. The business package offers 3 and the developer hosing gives you 5 domains at no charge.

Want more than that? Right now, you can get .com, .net, .org, .info, .us and .biz domains for just $6.99 a year. That's just through August 31, so you best hurry to get in on that bargain rate.

Clearly, 1&1 has deals going that are far superior to run of the mill hosting and domain name registration services. But then, they always do. Get all the details and sign up for your amazingly low cost web hosting packages with free domains while these specials are in effect.