Cheap reseller hosting - some tips

If you are looking for cheap reseller hosting, here are some tips before you dive right in.

First, look closely at what each reseller service offers before you sign up. You will be creating subaccounts from your main account. Make sure you have enough diskspace and bandwidth in the plan to resell to a reasonable number of customers: you could aim for 100. Some cheap reseller hosting accounts restrict the number of accounts you can create - make sure you know what the number is.

On the other hand, if you simply want a reseller account as a cheap way of hosting your own sites, or as a way of offering hosting to friends or colleagues, then this may not be so important.

As the administrator for the subacccounts you will sell or use, you will be using some form of overall hosting account manager (as well as something like Cpanel for the individual sites). This account manager will allow you to create new accounts, allocate resources to them, change passwords, send emails to your customers and so on. Make sure you can test out the account manager before you sign up for the reseller account. There are many types of these, and you need to be happy with something you are likely to be using every day.

Do you want private label reseller hosting? This means that the parent hosting company removes all references to itself, and it to the customer it appears you are the only entity involved in offering hosting. This makes you look more professional, but the reseller plans may no longer be so cheap.

Finally, what support will you be getting from the parent host? As hosting problems will usually be crtically important to your users, can you rely on 24/7 assistance for issues you can't resolve yourself? Do you want to concentrate on selling, rather than answering support questions? If so, look for a provider which can offer support directly to your customers. Again, this may cost more and may not be included in cheap reseller hosting.