Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

October 29, 2010

An Overview of Reseller Hosting

Looking for a new industry to tackle? Why not take a shot at reseller hosting? As you build your customer base, you will receive recurring monthly income from each as your business grows. Many web designers have the perfect opportunity to provide reseller hosting to their clients but end up moving on to the next project without consideration. With each customer, they could be earning additional money from reseller hosting.

Most major web hosting providers offer a “Reseller” plan which is designed specifically for those in the business. The plan is setup to charge the account holder a monthly fee for a single account with many sub-accounts which are those held by the reseller’s clients. The resources you receive with the $30 flat fee are broken down among various clients. As you acquire new clients, the fee will increase due to storage and bandwidth usage increases.

There are four basic components of a reseller hosting plan including:

• The web server and database
• The mail server
• The DNS server
• Brand-agnostic server

The web server is the software that is utilized by the hardware to search for inbound HTTP and HTTPS connections. Multiple websites are combined to use a single IP address. This allows resellers to cheaply host many different websites without the cost and hassle of adding extra IP addresses. The database server is exactly that, a server that provides all database functions. A single database server provides many databases.

Email servers manage sent and received emails. The SMTP protocol handles sending and IMAP or POP manages the receiving of emails. All-in-one options that include, scheduling, calendar and synchronization, are available but they tend to be higher end and therefore more expensive. In many instances, the original provider offers separate mail servers specifically for reseller use.

The DNS server provides the name and domain servers to the reseller client. This allows the customer to create sub-domains, new entry points and redirect traffic. Finally, the brand-agnostic server provides company branded server addresses so you are able to point to your name servers.

Reseller hosting can be a profitable business option with little upfront cost, the need for only basic technology knowledge and is pretty easy to manage. Most of the work lies in the advertising and billing inquires. With the costs of hosting continuing to decline, reseller web hosting is becoming more popular and lucrative. 

Tags: reseller hosting,  reseller hosting account,  reseller plan,  mail server,  DNS server,  brand agnostic server