if I buy a reseller account off xyz.com, how does that work? I understand I have to buy a vps or dedicated, but how do I collect payment?
and is it possible to open a reseller account without having your own "front", I.E. when customers sign up they would be doing it through xyz.com (and not my own hosting company/template) but the payment would still go to me.
This question gets asked a lot in our Helpdesk and I figured I would post our knowledgebase article here to help anyone else wondering the Pros and Cons of Unlimited Domain Shared Hosting vs. Reseller Hosting. If anyone has anything else to add, I appreciate any feedback on how we can improve our KB article.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Given the present state of shared hosting, many clients may ask "Why would I need a Reseller account if I can host unlimited Addon and Parked domains within a single shared hosting account?". There is certainly enough Disk Space and Bandwidth provided in many of today's hosting packages, so why bother to purchase a Reseller account?
Many don't realize the drawbacks of hosting large numbers of domains within a single hosting account until they've already packed tens of them onto a single package.
So how do you know whether a Reseller account or Shared Hosting account is right for you? The answer is in how you plan to provide access to others and how "mission-critical" the sites are. You should consider the following factors when deciding on hosting a large number of domains:
1. Who will be managing these sites?
2. How important is site security between sites?
3. Will these domains need dedicated SSLs?
4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?
In a nutshell, Reseller plans are for those who wish to host websites for other sub-clients and a shared hosting package is for a single individual managing multiple personal domains. We'll go over the 4 points above in greater detail.
1. Who will be managing these site?
If you personally own multiple domains and wish to host them within the same hosting space, you can easily do so with an Addon or Parked domain. An addon domain will allow you to host a new domain within a subdirectory of your hosting space. A parked domain will allow you to have multiple domain names point to the same content. Since addon domains reside within the same user space as your main domain, you can manage all of your domains with a single login. You can see the problem if you want to provide another user with access. Since all accounts are managed with a single set of login credentials, if you give another user access to their addon domain you are also giving them access to your main domain. If you have vital information stored on your main domain and you are hosting another domain as an addon domain for someone else, you cannot provide them access to their hosting without compromising the integrity of your main domain.
When hosting sites as a Reseller, your clients in turn will want access to their account and will want exclusive rights to their disk space and server resources. With a Reseller account, each sub-account you create gets its own username, password, and isolated user space on the server. Individual clients of yours have access to their user space and their user space alone. In addition to the isolation with regards to access concerns, each account also gets their own cPanel access. All of the same great features that you use to manage your sites can also be given to your clients. Next time client Y wants to add an email account, you don't have to do it for them for fear of giving them access to your cPanel, you can simply give them their login details and they can manage their own email accounts.
2. How important is site security between sites?
This is along the same lines as point 1. This is not necessarily related to who you are hosting for, but what content you are hosting. Imagine that you are a webmaster and you are hosting your own personal site-in-a-box community forums (such as PHPBB or vBulliten) on your main domain and a company website for a paying client on an addon domain. It is not uncommon for popular scripts to have security flaws in older versions. Script authors will often update security flaws in later versions of their software. For this reason, it is very important to keep scripts up to date on your site. But let's assume you forget to update your scripts for a couple of months and an unscrupulous individual takes advantage of a well known security hole. Using this exploit, they gain access to your forums and any subdirectories. Since you are hosting another domain as an addon, they now have access to this domain's content as well. A site defacement on this company's site may not bode well for you when they are considering you for web master services in the future.
If these two domains had been separate into two individual users (i.e. two subaccounts created through a Reseller), their content would've been inherently isolated server side by Linux's user management. Sure, your forums still would've been affected by the security hole, but the break-in would've been isolated to your site alone.
Going back to our example, let's say that instead of a corporate website as an addon domain you are hosting an image gallery site for all of your cats. In this case, it may not be a big deal if a compromise in your main domain spreads to your addon domain. After all, they are both owned by you and you're only losing some time and effort to restore these sites from your local backups (which I'm sure you've actively maintained ). But then again, you are losing time and time is money. If these sites had been separated into individual users, again, you'd only have to restore one site's content.
The idea here is isolation. Reseller plans provide you with the peace of mind to know that if one of your users doesn't keep up with their site's content as actively as they should, their actions won't negatively impact the content hosted on other domains. If you and those you host in your addons are diligent webmasters, maybe this point won't have much bearing on your decision. Only you can say for sure.
3. Will these domains need SSLs?
As of this writing, SSL certificates must have a dedicated IP address to be installed. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same shared hosting package, you can still install an SSL (or purchase a dedicated IP address and install one) but you are limited to exactly one SSL on your account. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same package (and consequently the same IP), you must choose which domains gets to have the dedicated SSL.
Sub accounts of Resellers can each be placed onto separate IP addresses and, as a result, can each have their own dedicated SSL installed.
Of course, both shared accounts and Resellers' sub accounts can use the server's shared SSL free of charge. However, some clients prefer to see their domain in the URL bar when they visit https.
4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?
We've already established that disk space and bandwidth will be no problem. But what about CPU, RAM, and MySQL resources?
It's important to be aware of the resource needs of your website. As administrators, we have to make sure all users "play nice" on the server. We can't have user X eating all of the CPU cycles computing pi to the trillionth decimal place while you are trying to serve web pages to your loyal visitors. We have to monitor the actions of all of our users and in the event someone is stepping beyond the bounds of acceptable resource consumption, we have to take action. In most cases, this entails disabling the abusive script, but in extreme cases we have to suspend the abusive user account to prevent other domains from encountering performance degradation on their sites.
If you are hosting 100 domains as addon domains, all serving nothing but static HTML pages, maybe you will stay off the radar.
But considering most sites are more complicated than static HTML, you may want to be aware of how many sites you host as addons and what content they serve. If you're hosting the latest and greatest Joomla modules, with up to date news feeds, integrated forums modules, polls, blog posts, etc your site can certainly require a degree of CPU to serve your pages. Now imagine you have 5 or 10 of these sites all hosted as addon domains. The resources these sites need to generate their content can quickly add up and before you know it you've got a friendly email from Acenet, Inc. in your inbox wondering why your user is consuming 2 of the 8 CPU cores on the server. That may be an exaggeration, but you get the idea. In the event your resource usage becomes so excessive that we have to suspend your user, now all of your sites are down instead of whichever one may be the direct cause of the spike in CPU, RAM, or MySQL consumption.
If each of these had been separate Reseller accounts, the offending account could've been suspended temporarily while we work through the cause, leaving the rest of your domains live and kicking.
The conclusion here is that you need to be aware of the needs of your sites in a general sense. Hosting unlimited domains within a shared hosting space is certainly a nice feature. For those webmasters who have multiple presences on the web, it's very convenient to be able to manage all of their personal domains from a single control panel. For those entrepreneurs who are hosting multiple domains for other individuals, the features and security associated with a Reseller plan and the inherent isolation of Linux users is a must have. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is my dilemma, thanks to a thread in these forums I was directed to a hosting website called pc-core.net and I was interested in using them, because it does not appear that they oversell at all. My question is regarding the fact that they have the shared hosting for $12/month with ~5gb of disk space and 50gb of transfer. I then just looked at reseller hosting for the heck of it, and noticed i could get a reseller hosting account with 45gb storage and 450gb of bandwidth for $10/month. Even though I wont be selling hosting, or anything like that, can I use a reseller hosting account like a normal shared hosting account?...just with more space and bandwidth?
I've had a VPS for about 4 years now, and overall have been happy with it. I have about 25 domains now, with moderate traffic to most of them. I'm getting close to the capacity of the VPS, and need to expand.
I'm thinking my next account will be a reseller account. The reason is that I don't want to have anything to do with managing the hosting. I view the reseller account as being a more hands-off hosting approach. Am I right in assuming this?
Capacity and cost of the various plans seem close enough to not be a factor for me.
Would I lose anything in going to reseller hosting? Most of my domains are pretty simple WordPress blogs or html sites.
I'm assuming that with reseller hosting, things like updating cpanel, php, mySQL, etc. are done by the hosting comapany and completely transparent to me.
I've been researching for a few weeks now trying to decide if I should go ahead and purchase vps hosting, and I tried out a few services and so far I'm really not seeing the advantage. a lot of these hosts only offer you about 256-384 mb of ram! how are you supposed to run a web server with so little ram? I installed one site on one vps i was trying out and it crashed immediately with "out of memory" exceptions...
this same site runs ok on reseller, a bit slow yes (which is why i wanted to move to vps) but I never got a memory error. not to mention that if you're running the web server AND the db server that's going to destroy your 384 mb of ram even 512 doesn't seem like enough...
now I'm not trying to bitch I'm trying to understand, maybe vps isn't what i'm looking for. can someone explain what the advantage is if I'm getting so little resources compared to reseller hosting?
I have been doing sites for poeple who up to now have already registered thier domain names themselves. I have seen lots of adverts offering reseller accounts but I don't understand how it all works I realise this sounds stupid but could someone explain the process to me please.
I currently have a reseller account that is clustered, but it still fails. Is there more troubles on a reseller server because of the other reseller accounts with resource hog customers? Will a VPS solve this issue? I need something a little more stable. I host some political websites and ecommerce stores that we want to keep their sites up as much as possible.
And yes I do know VPS servers go down to. I am just curious if they are more reliable.
I'm considering the advantage of using some of my hosting space/accounts to offer an affordable reseller package. (Yes, I do have permission to do this)
Anybody got advice/tips on how you've/would set this up?
I am stuck between GoDaddy and HostGator for reseller account. What I want is to offer my client to host their site I design on my hosting service but I also want to offer reseller program on other site.
Here are the problems:
GoDaddy have good automatic system, but it won't let me have the freedom to have access into my client's cpanel to upload or update their website unless they have to give me their username and password. GoDaddy requires me to purchase reseller and SUPER reseller package if I want to run two websites.
GatorHost offers me to manage WHM and Cpanel for my clients which is good. They also have ENOM for me to be domain dealer. The negative thing about Gatorhost is that I have to use one of their free template, if I need one, but their templates sucks! And I do not know how to tailor my own website with their WHM automated billing system.
What do you suggest and where can I find a good hosting template to edit. I just wish that GatorHost have automatic system with better template!
I'm thinking about diving into the world of web host reselling to host my clients web sites and help produce some residual income for myself
I have been comparing companies and their reselling plans for weeks now and am looking for some professional advice.
After searching through the forum I find a lot of designers and developers recommending hostgator
I like the looks of the plans offered by Green Geeks, you can find a rundown of their packages here: greenresellerwebhosting dot com
I like the unlimited disk space and bandwidth offered with every package and of course the green factor... however they do limit the number of domains you can host with each package.
I can't help to wonder if the unlimited diskspace and bandwidth is even necessary with the limited hosted domains and of course tech support for my clients is of vital importance
I have a few projects of making websites for some clients. I want to buy some hosting space, should i buy shared or resellers accounts? When they say one can host unlimited domains on a shared hosting space does it mean one can also use it for different clients. As of now i am not interested in just selling domain names and hosting spaces to clients. I need space only to host the website i design for my clients.
I would like to sign up for utropicmedia.net's reseller web hosting . But at the same time I have found an interesting thing on their web site. They offer web hosting in 3 regions: Europe, Asia and USA. What do you think is it worth to ask them about possibility to have some of sites hosted in Europe some in Asia and some in USA with one account.
why reseller accounts are considered better than shared hosting accounts?
Both are the same, except that reseller manages each domain separately. Shared hosting is way much cheaper than a reseller, are there really big negatives which make them much cheaper?
If SEO and Adsense wise, there is a difference between shared and reseller, due to separate domain management in the reseller being favourable for SEO, I would go with reseller.
So far, I've done shared hosting, and using htaccess, had no problems setting up multiple sites in my shared account, which is a lot cheaper than any reseller account. Not sure how the search engines would treat my multiple sites....
Are addon domains (in a shared hosting) - bad, since Cpanel actually treats them as subdomains?
to start a web design and hosting business and am in need of some hosting for it all...
I've looked at the reseller hosting at [url] which looks good, but they said that I cannot host a 'file distribution' web site. Because one of the sites I will be hosting is an eCommerce application that sells videos for download, I'm not sure whether this would be allowed. I read the SLA and I think it would be, as long as the bandwidth didn't exceed 25GB per month.
I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of other web hosting packages that might be suitable for everything I need (PHP4, PHP5, MySQL) that weren't too expensive. I don't really want to pay more than £40 per month.
Ideally I'd like unlimited bandwidth and data transfer and web space, but if not, at least enough for a good number of sites!
Please recommend me a linux & windows (dual) reseller web hosting that is cheap and reliable with automated billing software and anonymous name server along with 2 dedicated IP.
Does anyone have experience running a reseller service? Are you basically acting as another hosting company with customer support, etc?
My friend and I plan to do some freelance site design/coding on the site, and I was wondering whether it would be clever to do reseller hosting as well for any clients without hosting...
how come the difference between shared and resellers storage is so different? If you buy shared, you can get stupid amounts of storage like 250 gigs or even unlimited for $5 a month. Yet the same company sells a reseller account for $30 and you only get 20 gigs.
Assuming you are going to split that up and sell that 20 gigs in 1 gig blocks to try and make money, why wouldn't your potential customer buy the shared account instead, and get way more space? It seems backwards to me. Shared $5 should be 20 gigs, and resellers $30 should be 250 gigs. I'm talking about big name trusted sites, not fly-by-nights who have unlimited everything.
If your about to start up your own hosting company i would reccomend JustGotVPS.com there staff are VERY helpfull and quick support staff times. Cheap VPS's that are genuin i am currently running one of there top end ones with Cpanel with no problem. I would like to point out i have nothing to do with JustGotVPs.com i am writing this because of there great service and Admin support. I reccomend if your on a reseller to get one of these VPS's.
an affordable web hosting (around $20 monthly) which offers support for MagentoCommerce and also has reseller hosting. I am very interested in trying MediaTemple Grid service but apart from that they don't offer reseller hosting.
I had VPS from SolarVPS a year ago and I found that it requires full attention since it wasn't stable like dedicated server. So, I had to keep an eye on the server and websites where some technical problems happened. These problems like websites stopped working suddenly, email problems, Mysql permissions etc.
I totally agree that SolarVPS has a fantastic support and very quick. They supported me all over the past period. But, a week ago one of my client’s website was used for phishing Paypal customers and it seems like a hacker used the mailing script for this website. Therefore, SolrVPS stopped my VPS immediately and I am still keep on contacting Abuse Department to clarify the situation and resolve the problem. However, all my clients are down now because they are affected by stopping my VPS.
My question here, since I wasn't be able to administrate security or look after the websites at my VPS, what shall I do to have a rest of mind from these problems and concentrate on sales and light support?
Shall I go for dedicated? VPS again? Reseller? However, I always need root access to my server for my technical purposes.
The more I read on the forum, the more I'm beginning to consider a reseller plan.
Basically, I'm an ASP.NET/MS-SQL developer and I foresee myself developing (and possibly managing) a relatively small number of websites for people who likely have neither the technical skills nor desire to get too involved with maintaining their websites. So, I need to be able to host multiple domains, have multiple databases, and probably multiple FTP accounts.
The obvious advantage of reseller accounts, as I understand them, is that they give you the ability to provide the website owner (my customer) the tools to manage their site in more or less the same way they could if they directly set up their hosting account with GoDaddy or whomever. But, if my customers end up being people that don't want to mess with any of that, then this capability is not important. However, after looking at ResellerZoom.com, which I saw recommended in another thread, it seems the sheer capacity of resources available, e.g. unlimited databases, 200 domains, make it worth the slightly higher cost.
I see Site5 have a 5 dollar deal on their homepage, but I don't know if it's any good. I hear from a lot of people to get a reseller account if you plan to make a lot of websites. It's more expensive than the 5 dollar plan with less bandwidth and storage, so there got to be something to it. What are the benefits of a reseller account compared to that 5 dollar deal plan?
I currently have Reseller Hosting with Clook UK costing me £21.14 per month but I have noticed several providers now have VPS packages available for only £17.99 per month. The VPS packages are able to offer more storage space and higher bandwidth for less money.
I'm considering making the move to a Linux VPS service but need to know if the learning curve is steep in comparison to the CPanel/WHM environment I am used to?
I'll be looking to move 3 sites which all include forums onto this new service.
Can anyone recommend a good but fairly cheap host? All servers must be UK based.