Do webhost resellers provide better value for our money?

The hosting business is a buyer’s market. There simply are hundreds of web hosting outfits jockeying out there to get our money, right? We could be wrong. What appears to be diverse webhost companies may actually be agents or affiliates of a reseller. Resellers companies may also be leasing servers from datacenters.

A hosting reseller program is usually a business proposition. They allow us to have our very own web hosting business with the back-end management and customer support done by the resellers themselves. But let’s look at it from another point-of-view, that of webmasters and web entrepreneurs planning to develop more than a handful of blogs.

For a blog or 2, a shared web host is often enough, but once the development bug has bitten us, it’s difficult to stop on 2 domains. A lot of ideas start popping up and soon we have more than a dozen domains in our portfolio. It’s one reason why experienced webmasters go for resellers. We thought resellers are expensive, we thought resellers are only for elite webmasters. We took a closer look and found out we thought wrong.

Consider Reseller Panel, one of the mammoth reseller companies servicing hundreds of affiliates. These guys doesn’t bother with shared web hosting. They only offer resellers, VPS, and dedicated servers as part of their reseller program. Their cheapest Cpanel reseller plan is $25.00 per month. It comes with 30 gigabytes of disk space and 300 gigabytes of bandwith with a dedicated IP address and free domain reseller account.

Cheap shared hosting usually costs around $3.00 for 5 gigabyte of space (overselling) but, like we said in this post, it’s not the space or bandwidth that matters in this kind of account but the CPU resources. With a lot of hosting accounts squeezed tight into one server, we don’t really expect to be given a fair share of that CPU resources. Comparing it with Reseller Panel’s prices, their 30 GB account will cost $18 in shared web hosting terms, a difference of $7.00.

There are even more affordable packages than what Reseller Panel offers. The little gem RMO is currently hosted on costs $5.00 per month. The downside? Support is through ticket only to keep costs down. New webmasters may prefer the live or chat support of more expensive resellers.

We believe reseller web hosting gives us a bigger bang for our buck, aside from the oppurtunity to sell extra space to interested parties.