Some Web hosts have Reseller programs

How to Choose a Web Host

Like some other markets, the web-hosting is a competitive market, perhaps more so than others because of the increasing number of websites going live on a daily basis, literally thousands of them everyday. What many hosting customers do not realize is that the advertisements they come across may come from middlemen or better known as resellers instead of the actual host services providers. These resellers rent space and bandwidth on the hosts.

Therefore, it is important to understand the nuts and bolts of these reseller hosting if you want to capitalize on these ventures. This article looks at reseller market on two fronts:

1. Becoming a reseller yourself, and
2. Using reseller hosting service as your website host.

When you join a reseller partnership program with a hosting company, you actually become a member of the pool of so many to provide hosting services. The parent company, if you will, divides up its resources - the most important being disk space and bandwidth - among its reseller members. The parent company sells to the website owners, you and me, directly as well.

This way the parent company makes more money. The resellers work as hard by providing their resources to customers with the same functionality as the parent company but with a lower price. If the resellers, however, do not register customers at a steady rate, they risk going out of business.

If you are considering becoming a reseller or a client of a reseller, make sure you consider the following points about the reseller company:

Cost and Support Needs - You have to ask yourself a question about finding a host for your next website. Do you need 24/7 support, domain registration, web page design, or database and scripting support? Cost is also a factor for website developers in selecting a hosting/reseller service.

Disk Space Requirement - Hosting service providers offer packages with varying amount of storage capacity typically presented in the form of Megabytes (MB). If you tally the sizes of all your documents, images, videos on your web pages, you will have a better idea of how much space you would need. A lot more disk space is required if you upload multi-media content such as photos,  videos, or music that you want to make available on your website.

Data Transfer Needs - Like disk storage, it is essential for consumers of a reseller hosting service to be familiar with how much bandwidth they are getting a month and what the data transfer rate will be. These terms refer to how much data will be transferred from the server to the browser requesting your page in a given month. For example, if you just have a one page website that is 50KB in size and you get about 30,000 visits per month, your data transfer you should be looking for is
50,000 * 30,000 = 1,500,000,000. That is 1.5 billion bytes or 1.5 Giga Bytes (GB) of data transfer.

Is Reseller Hosting Right For Your Business? - There are countless instances where customers have been fooled by flashy advertisements with big promises such as unlimited disk storage, email accounts or data transfer. However, as we all know, there is no such thing as unlimited resources, any kind. There are cheap hosts that provide excellent quality and there are expensive hosts that provide below average quality and vice-versa. In many respects, selecting a host is part gamble part common sense. The latter comes from reading lots of reviews and just educating yourself.

Example of Making Money With Reseller Hosting - You buy a reseller web hosting package with 1,000 GB disk space and 1,000 MB bandwidth. You then break this into 10 separate accounts with 100 GB disk space and 100 MB bandwidth each and then you sell these smaller packages to your customers. So if you sell each of these packages for $10.00 dollars a month, you would be making $100.00 and your only cost is the reseller web hosting package which cost $15.00 a month. So your total profit would be $85.00 a month.

In a Nutshell
Using hosting provided by a reseller can be, overall, cost-effective for a startup website. However, to be a reseller can be a good source of extra revenue for your business. Reseller web hosting is the act of buying a large web hosting plan or dedicated server and then breaking it into smaller parts to resell to your clients. This definition is rather simple but you now understand the basic meaning.