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Web Hosting Compared - Shared Vs Reseller Hosting
by Gray Rollins
So, you want to set up a website. Your first decision is to
chose between buying a web server and all the supporting
equipment along with a network technician to run it for you,
or to find a company whose business is to run websites and
pay them a monthly fee to host your website on their
equipment. This question, at least is a no-brainer: unless
you are a big company going online for the first time
(almost unheard of these days), you can't afford the capital
investment to set up your own web server infrastructure. So
you chose to rent server space from a web hosting company.
Simple, right?
Not really. Once you start shopping around
for web hosting services, they have several different
options to choose from. One of the first big decisions to
make is if you want shared or reseller web hosting. But what
exactly is the difference?
In a nutshell, the difference is scale. In shared
hosting, you rent server space for a single website with a
single domain name. You would pay a separate monthly fee for
each additional website you set up. With reseller hosting,
you rent a large amount of server space, divide it up among
as many websites as you need, and then have the option to
resell the left over server space to other people to set up
websites-essentially making you a hosting subcontractor. So
which option should you choose? There are advantages and
disadvantages to both, and we'll examine each below.
The main advantages of shared web hosting is that it is
simple, cheap, and efficient on a small scale. For a
personal or small business website, this is all you will
need. You get one website and one domain name, often with
the option to set up sub-domains for the different parts of
your website. First, you are not only renting space on their
web server equipment, you were renting their support. It is
the responsibility of your hosting provider to keep your
website constantly accessible and running smoothly, and
provide you with any technical support you might need-making
this one less issue, you have to worry about when running
your own business. Second, shared web hosting is five to
twenty times cheaper than reseller hosting, with prices
ranging as low as $5 per month, or even free.
There are drawbacks to free hosting sites, however. The
main one is reliability. As you are not a paying customer,
if the site goes down, all you can do is wait. You have no
contract guaranteeing you a set response time for internet
outages. Free hosting is great for a personal website, but
if you're running a small business where your website needs
to be available 24/7/365 and you need quick, reliable
support for any and technical problems, then you'll
definitely want to go with a paid host. The costs vary
depending on how big your web site is, and how much web
traffic you anticipate. The web hosting company Hostgator,
for example, offers three shared hosting packages varying
between $4.95 and $12.95 a month. Finally, if you want to
set up another website, you have to buy another shared web
hosting plan, and your monthly expenses have just doubled.
The main advantages of reseller hosting is flexibility
and economies of scale. If you are running a fast-growing
company, or are an entrepreneur running multiple businesses,
then the cost of multiple shared accounts every month can
quickly add up. With reseller web hosting, you can set up as
many websites as you need, and reallocate resources among
them as they grow over time. Of course, you can rent out or
resell and left over space to other individuals or small
businesses to run their websites. If you juggle the finances
well, reseller can be much cheap on a large scale than
shared web hosting.
There are, however, two main drawbacks to reseller
hosting. The first is expense. While
Hostgator offers shared web hosting for prices between
$5 and $13 a month, their reseller packages vary between $25
and $100 a month, depending on size and traffic. Sure, some
of this expense could be offset by reselling your unused web
space to others, but that is never a sure thing. What if you
have trouble finding customers? There is a good chance that
in any given month, you will have some hosting space you are
not using, but still paying for.
The second problem is that, as a hosting subcontractor,
you are now responsible for maintaining support to all the
people you resold web hosting space to-except that you
actually have very little power over such technical
problems. Although you often have some limited
administrative functionality, all you can do for serious
technical problems like an internet outage is pass the
information on to your web hosting provider. Once your
customers realize you are essentially just a near-powerless
middleman, they may lose confidence in you and switch to a
different web hosting provider. It doesn't take much to ruin
your brand name, and once that happens, your monthly
reseller web hosting costs will rise and you lose customers
to offset those monthly costs.
Still trying to decide where to go for web
hosting? Check out
Affordable Web Hosting for our top hosting
recommendations.
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gray_Rollins
http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Hosting-Compared---Shared-Vs-Reseller-Hosting&id=1803357
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