What Is A Web Host Reseller?
The market for web hosting has exploded in the last few years, with an ever-increasing, and sometimes bewildering number of options available for consumers looking to gain internet exposure.
How can the market sustain so many companies, apparently all competing with each other for your business?
The simple answer is that it can't!
There are only a handful of true "top tier" web hosts, hosts with the resources to offer 24/7 support and the technical experience to keep a highly technical and challenging system from falling apart.
However, there are tens of thousands of companies all offering what, on the surface, seem like just as good deals. How can this be so?
The truth is that the vast majority of web hosts are simply resellers of hosting plans for companies "further up the food chain"
What this means is that somebody buys a "reseller plan" from company A (A is a true top tier provider), they pay (say) $24.95 a month for the privilege, and they are then able to
divide this space up into as many domains as they want, and "resell" as individual accounts for (say) $9.95 a month.
It doesn't take a genius to see that they will only need to resell 3 plans to make a profit.
Often, a reseller account comes with a larger bandwidth and disk space allowance than a regular shared account.
For example, a typical reseller account might offer 200GB of bandwidth and up to 10GB of disk space.
The "Overselling" Problem
You might ask how a reseller can make a decent profit when they (seemingly) can only provide 4 or 5 accounts on their reseller plan to remain competitive.
For example, if the reseller plan offers 200GB of bandwidth per month, and they offer accounts with 20GB of bandwidth a month, then surely they are limited to 10 accounts?
Not at all! This is where problems can, and often do occur.
Since the canny reseller realises that the vast majority of users will not use anywhere near the 20GB a month bandwidth allowance, or use up all the allocated disk space, he is able to squeeze many times the number of hosts into the one account.
result: More profit for the reseller, but (potentially), reduced quality of service for the unsuspecting customer!
This is not just a tactic employed my resellers, most top tier web hosts also use this technique to offer ever increasing amounts of bandwidth and storage, knowing
full well that if every user maxed out their allowance, they would be in trouble.
When properly managed and monitored, this practice is not harmful, it is when unscupulous web hosts put profit before other factors that
the unwary customer loses out.
So What Can I Do About It?
We only include top tier hosts in our ratings, so you can be assured any one of these will provide excellent
customer service, performance and features.
The easiest way to find out if the web host you are considering joining is a top tier company is to E-mail their support
department to ask them.
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