Shared vs Reseller Hosting

[CuriousGal]

I have a fair knowledge on both the terminologies and process of Shared and Reseller hostings! However, Its always hard and a bit confusing for me to exactly differentaite these two!

As we all know, shared hosting is the most common type of budget web hosting! We are actually hosted on a server which has different websites which we are sharing with. Users under this Shared Hosting plan often experience slow speeds as many other websites are also sharing the same single resource! These are all well known! But my query is what Reseller Hosting are?
As per my understanding, Reseller hosting is very similar to shared hosting. Perhaps, the Reseller hosting takes place on a shared server. So, In what way do they differ from these Shared Server concept? Is it that we can start our own hosting business in case of Reseller Hosting

Can anyone clarify? Please

[monaghan]

Reseller hosting is the next step up from shared hosting, generally you have an additional (or extended) control panel that allows you to partition your server resource into packages that you can then give out a seperate control panel login to your customer in order that they can manage that portion of your resource for themself.

Usually a reseller account will be sharing part of a server's resources along with other shared accounts (possibly also other resellers)

A reseller account does not have to be just for reselling space for profit. Several of my customers have multiple domains and use a reseller account to manage each of these domains as a seperate resource without the overhead of buying multiple accounts from me.

Also a web designer or other consultant may choose to have a reseller account to manage his customer accounts rather than run a VPS or small dedicated server, therefore leaving the server management to the hosting company.

Where you need *nix root or Windows Administrator level access, then a reseller is not a suitable option.

[soul-healer]

nicely explained mnaghan i like reading it.

[penguinmama]

Thanks, Monaghan. I wasn't clear on that, myself. So a reseller actually has a portion of the resources allotted to him/her, usually at a reduced price, which he can then either use or resell to several others. Is that correct? What is the server's owner's profit in this? Wouldn't it be more to their advantage to sell the sites at their own price rather than a reduced rate?

[monaghan]

You'll often generate more cash by selling individual sites rather than reseller accounts, however the more customers you have the more support requests you get and the bigger effort involved with billing, so you spend more cash on support and accounting.

Generally a reseller will be more informed and will resolve support issues (except for server issues) themselves with no involvement from the server admin. The reseller has to take care of billing his customers and providing the support to them.

Some reseller providers will offer support to the reseller's end users, but this is usually at a higher fee than a standard reseller to cover the additional support costs.