By Damien Gleadall

Introduction
Shared and Reseller web hosting have many similarities, many web hosts offer both shared and reseller hosting. The main difference between the two are in the names ‘shared’, you are sharing resources, which is the same for ‘reseller’ in a way but yo can resell the server resources. You can create your own web hosting accounts and share your allocated server resources with your clients.

The host still remains in control of their server and are responsible for updating server software and maintaining the server. The host will usually also provide support to the reseller, so if there are any issue or faults the reseller will be able to contact the host.

Do I need a Reseller Hosting Account?
Most personal and small business users will have no use for a reseller account, a reseller account is useful to those users who have a number of web sites and want to save money, as a reseller account can be cheaper than purchasing multiple shared hosting account.

With a reseller account you can also sell hosting, so this can be a relatively cheap step into the hosting business. You have the flexibility of controlling your own clients, creating, suspending and terminating accounts. You also have the knowledge that the server is being maintained for you, so you only have to worry about your clients and web site.

The Benefits
If you own a number of web sites, using a reseller account can save you money, and you can create accounts when you need them and share the resources between your web sites easily. You can find reseller hosting accounts with plenty of bandwidth and disk space for around $25 - $50 a month, which can be a big saving if you have a number of web sites needing hosting.

You also don’t have to worry about the maintenance of the server, since the web host should have this covered. You should also receive technical support included with your account.

If you have plans to start to own web hosting business, a reseller account can be an easy first step in the hosting industry. It is a relatively low cost solution, meaning you can concentrate primarily on building your business slowly and generate a steady monthly income. One of the biggest mistakes new hosts make is try to accomplish too much in a short period of time. This can lead to unhappy customers and evidently losing clients.

The disadvantages
Potential clients may not be totally confident purchasing a hosting account from a reseller, because you in affect are the middle man. If a problem arises with the server or a customers account, they need to contact you and if you are unable to deal with the problem yourself, you would in turn have to contact your host. This can be a long process from initially receiving the first support request to getting the problem resolved. However if you have proper customer support in place this shouldn’t be a major problem.

As a reseller like I said above you have limited access to admin functions, and if you have experience with the control panel and server software you may find this annoying. The only thing I can suggest is asking the host if it would be possible for them to enable your account more with admin privileges. The worse thing the host can say is ‘no’, so it’s worth a try.

Final thoughts
In my opinion reseller hosting is worth the money you can pay out, it is a good step in selling web hosting and if done properly enables a small business to generate a profit from reselling shared hosting accounts.

If you have high bandwidth or disk space requirements reseller hosting may not be the best solution, possibly a dedicated server would be better suited if you have the technical knowledge.

About the Author: I have had experience with a number of hosting companies over the last year and have learnt alot about running a successful business. I am currently involved with Web Hosting Complete a free hosting forum site This article was submitted to www.isnare.com.

Source: www.isnare.com

Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=68492&ca=Internet

By Trevor Mulholland

Smart resellers know how to make the most of their web space, and to sell it in a way that attracts all kinds of people who may be interested. If you are a reseller, you will want to attract “sub-resellers,” and you can do this if you have sufficient command over the features that come with WHM reseller hosting.

WHM reseller hosting is a kind of hosting account that can only be purchased by resellers directly from a web host. WHM stands for “web host management,” which in itself should describe its purpose. It is installed in a web host, usually along with cPanel, which is a web panel software which is actually another bestseller of the company that created WHM: cPanel.net.

While it makes sense for a reseller to target only a specific sector - individual users who want to make personal websites, or small business entrepreneurs who want to put up small online stores - a service provider who aspires to become truly successful would know that branching out is essential to the growth of a business. And to branch out efficiently, one needs to be able to market one’s services efficiently. After all reseller vendors are, first and foremost, marketers of web space that they do not personally own - therefore markting skills are paramount.

But on top of being marketing professionals, resellers are often service providers, too. Smart resellers take it upon themselves to handle the customer relations end of the web host distribution business, and take care of their customers’ needs. Now - in case a customer wants to be able to “resell” web space at a truly optimum cost, a reseller should be able to acknowledge this as an open market, because there is a wealth of customers out there who want to be able to earn from their purchased web spaces at all, by any way possible!

And above all else, a reseller should not view these “sub-resellers” as competition. Sub-resellers serve to address the needs of other interested web space buyers, while shouldering the cost of maintaining the web space they redistribute! Quite like the reseller does, they sell web space at a profit, while shouldering the agreed-upon retail cost of the web space they already enjoy.

At any rate, “sub-resellers” are not competition to legitimate reseller vendors on the strictest sense. WHM reseller hosting is only available to first-level resellers… which means “sub-resellers” will have to create user accounts only through the cPanel. WHM allows first-level reseller vendors to create user accounts for sub-resellers, and sub-resellers can only make user accounts for other people who need to “squat” in their web space. Further sub-levels of user accounts may not be generated.

ResellerShed.com provides you with info on Affordable hosting reseller, whm reseller hosting and much more, come take a look at http://www.resellershed.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Trevor_Mulholland
http://EzineArticles.com/?Creating-Sub-Resellers-With-WHM-Reseller-Hosting&id=328017

By Mary Wynn Lewis

Reseller hosting is a form of web hosting wherein the account owner has the ability to use the allotted hard drive space and bandwidth to host websites on behalf of third parties. Most reseller hosting plans allow resellers to create their own service plans and choose their own pricing structure. It is great way for those who want to start their own small web hosting company and who want to manage and host multiple web sites with separate control panels at an affordable way.

Reseller hosting is the perfect solution for webmasters, designers, developers, internet consultants or anyone wanting to start a profitable online business. If you’re looking to get into the reseller hosting business, cPanel reseller hosting is the best option. Reseller hosting is almost the same as a shared web hosting account except you are given more control over your account. A webmaster may require a network of websites under different domain names to serve different business plans, but all are hosted under a common reseller hosting account.

Advantages of Reseller Hosting are:

1. A reseller hosting account accrues significant benefits over both short and long term.

2 While your hosting provider remains content allotting you space in their server, you are free to build up branded reseller hosting business.

3. In many cases of reseller hosting, the server owner may agree to naming nameserver after your company name and even allot a separate IP address for your nameservers.

4. It is possible to host many websites, limited only by disk-space and bandwidth.

5. Reseller hosting accounts are mostly scalable, allowing complete flexibility to enlarge your hosting account as required.

6.A reputable and experience web hosting provider will constantly monitor the performance of the web server and will add new web servers when necessary

7.Shared hosting accounts can be created.

Most of the resellers are web designers, consultants or marketers, who want to offer their customers a complete package with hosting included. A web hosting provider will often give a discount of 50 percent or more to the resellers on the price of a reseller hosting account.

Reseller web hosting is an ideal solution for those who already have a web site but maximum reliability, performance and uptime is critical to their business or e-commerce web site.
A reseller is responsible for their own customer base only, but any hardware, software and connectivity problems are the responsibility of the server provider from whom the reseller plan was purchased. Reseller web hosts are normally not in charge of maintaining web server services or other maintenance related responsibilities but just a “web hosting provider.

Mary Lewis

http://www.pixelled-solutions.com

the affordable web hosting company.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mary_Wynn_Lewis
http://EzineArticles.com/?Why-Choose-a-Reseller-Hosting-Account?&id=720823

One of the problems with reselling web hosting, as in any other business, is the competition. There are a lot of web hosts out there, all competing for customers and all trying to offer the best deals.

How can you, with your new reseller hosting website, hope to compete against the established web hosting companies.

Well, there are a number of things that are in your favour.

Firstly, web hosting is an expanding market, so although there are a lot of competitors, there’s plenty of room for you to set up your reseller hosting business.

Secondly, the big web hosting companies need to concentrate on the general market.

This means that, as in other internet based businesses, concentrating on niche markets can be more profitable, especially if you choose a niche that other people aren’t exploiting.
You can differentiate yourself from all the other web hosting companies out there by offering a different combination of features, or maybe even just by emphasizing different features that might appeal to a particular niche.

For instance, maybe you could concentrate on hosting for real estate sites. Now most cPanel hosting with Fantastico has Open-Realty available for installing. Yet I don’t know of anybody who makes that a selling point for their web hosting.

Of course, you’re not just limited to what comes with your reseller package.

By concentrating on a niche market, you can become recognised as an expert in the field, and benefit from recommendations from existing clients in that niche. It also enables you to concentrate your advertising and marketing efforts into an area where there may be little or no competition.

There are vertical niches i.e. particular market sectors, such as doctors, architects, auto spares, cycle shops, etc, and horizontal niches, such as local small businesses etc, so you shouldn’t have difficulty finding a niche that you can identify with and become a trusted partner in.

The next question is - when am I going take my own advice and which niche am I going to choose for my web hosting business…hmmm.

How I Set up my Web Hosting Store

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, there’s an option if you don’t have much cash to put into starting a reseller hosting business - get a free hosting reseller account.

If you want to get started straight away, you can get one from Resellers Panel

Signing up for an account

I’ve signed up for an account myself, and its a pretty painless process. No setup fees or deposits are required to start using the reseller hosting solution. But you can, if you want to, order a domain name for your new web hosting site at the same time. This is the option I took, and paid $8 to register the domain name www.ddwebsitehosting.com.

Remember - the domain name is optional - you can start straight away without it. If you don’t have your own domain name, your website will be given an URL on their domain automatically. You can also use an existing domain name if you already have one, you just need to change its nameservers to point to your new store and fill in the appropriate boxes on the setup form.

After the signup you will be provided with a web address that you can start using immediately. You can build your reseller website quickly using the control panel menu.

Customize your Store

You’ve already given your store a name, but now you’ll want to customize it. The first thing to do is choose a template for your new web hosting site. Resellers Panel offer you a choice of 16 templates - choose one you like as the basis for your site. I went with the recommended template (the newest one).

But you’re not finished there - you can upload a header graphic with your own logo, edit the metatags, add up to 3 link buttons (to you other websites?) and edit the header and footer (you don’t need to do it all at once - you can go back to it later).

Of course, much of the look and feel of your site will remain the same as the template you’ve chosen. If you have more knowledge of HTML, Javascript and IFRAMES, you have the option to design your own web hosting site, using Resellers Panels remote forms or their Resellers API. Remember that Resellers Panel will still handle all the support and billing details, leaving you free to get on with promoting your business

For now, I’ve stuck with the standard hosted option; at a later date I’ll investigate the more advanced options and let you know how I get on.

Set up Hosting Plans and Prices

After setting up your store, the next thing is to create your hosting packages and prices. Again - you don’t need to - you can start immediately with just the two included web hosting packages, the Business Package and the Corporate Package, which are both good value.

Assuming you keep the two included packages, this leaves you the possibility of creating up to 18 more hosting packages using the Liquid Plan Builder. The Liquid Plan builder is a great tool that calculates the wholesale price for you in real time as you decide on options for your plan, so you can easily try out different options and see how they affect the price.

Creating hosting plans is my only real niggle with the account - the two standard packages are such good value, that its hard to come up with other plans that come close. I tried fitting another plan in between the two (the Duo Plan if you look at my store) that offered people who need to host 2 websites an option between the single domain Business plan and the 10 domain Corporate

Unfortunately, the price worked out almost as much as the Corporate, and I would make less profit on it than either of the other two plans, so I had to juggle the prices of the other two plans about, and reduce the webspace allowance on my Duo Plan to get a reasonable selling price differential between the plans.

You can of course, create plans above the existing plans - you really have no limit on the webspace you can offer, because you haven’t bought a set amount of webspace to divide up, as you do with normal reseller accounts.

OK thats it for now - you can check out the site at www.ddwebsitehosting.com and keep an eye on the progress as I add more plans, and eventually investigate the more advanced features.

Get started with your own web hosting business - try out Resellers Panel now - there’s no cost and no risk!

Technorati Tags: reseller, free hosting reseller account, hosting packages, web hosting

For those new to reseller hosting, overselling is the practice of selling more webspace/bandwidth than you’ve got, in the hope that none of your customers will ever use anything like their full allocation anyway. The practice is common, not only in web hosting, but also in other industries - but is it an acceptable practice or a ripoff for customers?

Advantages of overselling web hosting
You might think that there are only advantages for the web host or hosting reseller, but actually there are advantages for the customer too.

Let us say you’re starting out in reseller hosting with a 5Gb webspace/50Gb bandwidth hosting package and you want to entice your customers with a web hosting starter package that offers them 500Mb storage and 5Gb bandwith allocation. That means after you’ve signed up 10 customers, you’ve run out of space and bandwidth - time to upgrade to a bigger package?

Well, maybe, maybe not. Take a look at the actual resources being used by your customers. Chances are none of them are using anything like their allocation of disc space or bandwidth. Perhaps quite a few of them are websites belonging to small businesses, either a limited number of static html pages, or maybe a small ecommerce site selling a few dozen products.

You know and I know that such a site does not usually need 500Mb webspace. One of my web design (not hosting) clients runs a successful online store selling their own brand of equine products (about 30 products). Disc space used is about 15Mb out of an allocation of 500Mb.

So - if you’ve reached the theoretical limit of what you can sell, but in actual fact you’re nowhere near that limit, you can continue to sell more hosting packages - and the clear advantage to you is that you make more money without it costing you more for hosting.

What about the advantage for the customer? Well, thats easy - if overselling were not a standard practice throughout the industry, web hosting prices would invariably be higher.

Disadvantages of overselling web hosting
There are two main disadvantages to overselling. Firstly, of course, all of your customers could start using up all of their allocation, leaving you unable to supply the service that you’ve sold. In practice, this is unlikely to happen, any build up would happen over a period of time and you should be able to spot it and make plans. As a reseller, you will be in the position of being able to upgrade your reseller plan to cope with it.

The second disadvantage is the resource usage of the processor. The processing power of the processor is the main limit to how many websites a particular server can host. Too many websites and the server will get overloaded and performance will become unacceptable. Again, this is largely dependant on the type of sites hosted - sites running lots of scripts/busy forums etc. will have more resource usage than mom & pop business sites.

Should you oversell or not?
While there are people who think that overselling is evil, the majority of web hosting resellers will say that they need to oversell to make a profit. There are many reseller accounts that specifically advertise that overselling is allowed - it’s sold as a positive benefit of their package. There are others (not so many!) that proudly proclaim that they do not allow overselling.

My view is that overselling is fine, if the situation allows it. Only you will know that - it will depend on the type of sites you are hosting and the resource usage. And of course, if one or more of your customers does start to use their entire allocation, you must have a plan in place to be able to supply them with it. As long as you not overload the capabilities of the processor, then there should be no problem.

Some people say overselling is immoral because you are selling more than you have got. That really isn’t the case. In the example above, if you’ve sold 10 packages and you find you’ve still got half your disc space/bandwidth unused, then you would not be selling more than you’ve got.

In fact if you are selling someone a 500Mb plan, you are selling them the ability to use 500Mb storage, you are not selling them a particular 500Mb chunk. As long as they can use that much when they want it, by upgrading if necessary. then its OK.

Technorati Tags: web+hosting, reseller+hosting, overselling, hosting, webspace, bandwidth

If you are looking for reseller hosting so you can host multiple domains, you’ve got a wide choice, not just of web hosting companies, but also the type of web hosting package you go for.

Many people choose a reseller hosting package just in order to host several (or many!) of their own domains. In the past, this was the only option when you wanted to host many domains under one account, rather than buy seperate hosting for each of your own websites.

Now, however, many web hosts offer multi-domain hosting as well as reseller hosting

Difference between Reseller Hosting and Multi-domain hosting

There are two main differences between reseller hosting and multi-domain hosting

The first is in the administration of the domains. With reseller hosting, you have a web hosting manager to add and manage domains, set disc space and quotas for each domain, etc. Each domain then has its own control panel for administration of the domain - setting up of email accounts, ftp, webmail, installing scripts and programs, checking visitor statistics etc. Typically you have a seperate login to the control panel for each domain, although the “master” account may be able to log in to any of them.

With a multi-domain account, you typically do not have a web hosting manager. You only have one control panel (for the “master” domain) and all administration is carried out from here. When you add a new domain to your account, it is simply created in a sub-domain and the domain name is pointed to that subdomain. Similarly, all the administration for every website you have is carried out from the one control panel. For instance, if you have Fantastico on your hosting account, and you want to install, say, Wordpress, you click to install it and you can then browse to the domain you want it installed on.

Clearly, this is no good if you have a number of customers who each need to be able to use there own control panels; but if all the websites you are hosting are your own, it can be easier to administer them all from a single control panel

Which brings us to the second important difference between a reseller package and a multi-domain account - the price. Multi-domain accounts are invariably cheaper because you don’t have the complication of seperate control panels and a seperate hosting manager.

For instance Hostgator offer an unlimited domain 5Gb account for $9.95/month (this website is hosted with them using this package and I thoroughly recommend it). If you want the reseller account with 5Gb webspace, it is $24.95/month.

So, if all the sites you want to host are your own, a multi-domain account may be a better bet for you. But what if you expand and want to start hosting other peoples sites? Well - there’s nothing stopping you from upgrading, or having a reseller account as well!

The right web hosting reseller package for you will depend on what you want from your reseller host, and what kind of web hosting reseller you aim to be. Reseller packages are available to meet differing needs - some provide you with a turnkey solution for setting up a standalone business in reseller hosting, while others provide you with the hosting and allow you to integrate your own billing system.

Web Designers

Are you a web designer who wants to be able to host your customers websites? In that case, customer billing management and templates to build a hosting website may be of little interest. Its likely that the cost of the hosting will be included in the bill for your services. You may not want other people to host their own websites with you, so there is no need for a standalone web hosting sales site.

Webhosting Business

If on the other hand, you are looking for reseller hosting to start your own web hosting business, the amount of support given to you to enable enable you to convert visitors to customers will affect your choice. Some hosting companies provide you with a reseller account only, and leave the arrangements for selling and billing up to you. Others provide you with the tools to allow visitors to signup from your website, pay you with their credit card and automatically have their account created within minutes.

Unless you already have a suitable sales site, or the expertise to create one, you are probably better off with this kind of reseller package.

Technorati Tags: reseller hosting, hosting website, web hosting business, reseller package