Reseller Web Hosting
From Website Hosting Wiki
Reseller web hosting is a type of web hosting in which the account owner uses their hard drive space and bandwidth to host other people’s websites. The reseller purchases the host’s services at wholesale prices and in turn sells them to their customers for a profit. The hard drive space and bandwidth is allocated to the reseller and their customers. The reseller can actually rent a dedicated server from the hosting company or resell the shared hosting service they have to their customers. With shared web hosting reselling, the reseller has been given permission to sell so much server space and bandwidth to their customers and they do not have to rent the server from the hosting company.
Web hosting resellers can be a web design firm, web developer, or systems integrator that offers web hosting as an add-on service to the things they already provide. It is a very inexpensive way for people who want to start their own web hosting company. Reseller hosting plans allow the resellers to create their own service plans and pricing structures. This allows resellers to establish their own branding and they can use customized control panels and name servers.
People who are looking to start their own reseller service do not need to know the technical aspects of web hosting. These technicalities are usually handed by data center operators who maintain network infrastructures and hardware, which means that the reseller does not need to know any of the technical information as he has someone in the background doing this area of the service for him. Technically this really makes him the middle man in the service. The dedicated server owner is responsible for configuring, securing, and updating the server. Resellers are responsible for interfacing their customer base, or building their business in other terms but any form of software, hardware, and connectivity problems are taken care of by the server provider in which the reseller plan has been purchased.
Resellers use control panels to manage customer accounts through a web interface and come of the most well known control panel programs include but are not limited to: Cortex Provisioning System (Windows); WHM/cPanel (Unix)(Windows version coming soon); Plesk (Windows/Unix); DirectAdmin (Unix); Webmin (Unix); Ensim Pro (Windows/Unix); and Helm (Windows).
Most reseller web hosting services offer their customers the same features that shared web hosting services and even dedicated web hosting services offer.
