| Most people understand that web hosting involves maintaining a website’s connection to the Internet so that visitors can find it. But there are many different types of web hosting available, with different characteristics that can affect the experiences of site owners and their visitors. This article takes a look at reseller web hosting. What is reseller web hosting? There are three different categories of web hosting, divided around server issues: dedicated, shared or virtual, and reseller. With dedicated web hosting, your website is the only site on the server, and you have your own dedicated IP address. It offers website owners more control, but it also costs more than the other options. Shared hosting is the most common type of web hosting. You have an account with a company to which you pay a yearly fee. In return, you get to use a pre-set amount of space and bandwidth, and you may benefit from some extras such as support for PHP. You are usually allowed to host only one domain at a time. It costs much less than dedicated web hosting, but you also have less control and fewer resources at your disposal. With reseller web hosting, a web host buys a bulk plan from a larger company. The larger company owns and maintains the server in its data center. The reseller subdivides the bulk plan into smaller plans, and resells these pieces to individual users. The experience of the individual user may not be any different with a reseller web host than with a web host that owns its own servers. Indeed, it might even be better. Who do reseller web hosts buy their packages from? Companies that offer reseller web hosting packages fall into two categories. The first category includes the large data centers. These facilities house hundreds or thousands of web servers. Firms with these resources concentrate their skills on server maintenance and administration. For them, offering reseller web hosting packages provides a “division of labor” of sorts: they can focus on their technical expertise, and leave marketing and a certain amount of customer service to the resellers.
The second category of companies that offer reseller web hosting packages are one step down from the large data centers. They lease or colocate their own dedicated server(s) in secure data center facilities. They may actually own the server, and even maintain it. Keeping the server in another company’s data center often allows them to benefit from improved security, a faster connection to the Internet, and other items. |
