Shared Hosting vs Reseller Hosting

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting plans are “single user” plans that are designed for single website applications. This typically is used by a small business that has a single website or an individual looking to host their portfolio site. Shared hosting plans can also host multiple websites using “addon domains”. These are simply sub-directories under the main account with DNS maps which point to them. While hosting multiple sites on a single account, there’s actually a lot of performance & security issues from doing this.

For example, say we have a shared hosting account with 10 addon domains and one of them get hacked, now the hacker has access to all other websites residing on this account. To add to security concerns, we also have performance issues to go along with that. Each account (cPanel account or shared account) is allocated a certain amount of resources (memory/cpu/I/O). As more & more websites are added to this single account, each one consumes a chunk of those resources. As more & more websites are added, they each compete against each other for memory/processing power which ultimately will slow the account that means slow down websites.
It is like living in an apartment where we share a common space with your neighbors. We cannot customize anything but we can share maintenance cost and responsibility with our neighbors. Shared hosting is the most commonly used method of hosting, and is used for customers who have chosen trial or low-cost hosting packages.

 

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting accounts are also great for web designers, development firms & anyone or any company that needs to host multiple website accounts. A reseller account can be had for the price of a few shared hosting accounts. Most companies will offer starter plans in the $20 range (some cheaper, but remember we get what we pay for – and the core of our service is not something to dull ). There’s no server maintenance required with a reseller account. Our provider will manage everything just as with a shared hosting account. Some providers will even provide end user support to our customers, although it’s not common and it will cost us. cPanel for example doesn’t offer its automated transfer feature (including the extremely handy express transfer) for resellers, we have to have root access to the server. Reseller hosting is similar to shared hosting with one major difference that it have a dashboard to manage multiple single accounts. This means with a reseller hosting account, we can create multiple shared hosting plans and use a single dashboard (WHM) to manage them. As you add more & more websites, we can split each website onto its own cPanel account that has its own login username & password, email accounts and most importantly, its own resources.
In addition to simply using a reseller plan for hosting multiple websites, many hosting resellers utilize reseller plans from a parent provider to sell web hosting to their clients. We can utilize the included billing software to automatically bill our clients, provide a support desk & automatically provision hosting accounts from automated ordering.