Reseller hosting explained
A block of shared-hosting capacity you can subdivide into accounts under your own brand, with your own prices and your own billing. The underlying machine, and its limits, still belong to someone else.
- You get
- A panel that creates and manages customer accounts, with quotas you set
- You own
- The customer relationship, the billing and the support queue
- You do not own
- The server, the resource limits, or the uptime
- Typical use
- Agencies and freelancers hosting the sites they build
How the layers fit together
The provider gives you a reseller panel — WHM above cPanel is the classic arrangement — which creates individual hosting accounts and assigns each a package: disk, bandwidth, databases, mailboxes. Your customers log into an ordinary control panel and never see the layer above. You can brand the panel, set nameservers on your own domain, and price however you like.
What you cannot do is exceed the parent plan. Your total quota is the ceiling, and the provider's per-account CPU and process limits still apply to each of your customers.
Where the model strains
- You absorb support. Your customers contact you, and you contact the provider. Every incident is relayed twice, and the provider's response time becomes yours with an added delay.
- You inherit outages you cannot fix. Explaining someone else's downtime to a paying customer is the job.
- One bad account can affect the rest. A compromised customer site consuming resources or sending spam affects your whole allocation, and mail reputation is shared.
- Margins are thin. You are reselling a commodity at a markup. The money is in the work around it — design, maintenance, retainers — not the hosting line item.
The usual alternative
Many agencies skip reseller plans and put client sites on a VPS they administer, or hand each client their own account at a host and bill for management instead. The VPS route is more control and more responsibility; the separate-accounts route means a client can leave with their site intact, which is either a feature or a problem depending on your business.