As a follow up to my last post here at The Honest Way Blog, where I gave a certain hosting account a hard time and deservedly so, I decided to take a closer look at reseller accounts for anyone who is thinking about going this route. Remember, you really only need a reseller if you are intending to either host a lot of domains yourself, or your online business caters for hosting customer domains.
First of all, what is a reseller account?
This is a type of hosting account that allows you to create individual hosting accounts for single (or multiple) domains withing one easy to control and administrate hosting account. Think of it like owning a department store, where each floor is sub-let to a different business, so that say the ground floor is your own where you sell electrical goods, then the first floor is owned by a company that sells clothes, the next floor sells kitchen equipment and the next sells furniture and so on.
Online, a reseller account does pretty much the same thing as a brick and mortar department store in which it allows you to have all those different users who sell their own stuff together under one roof. Of course the difference here is that a brick and mortar store is limited by its physical size, whereas a reseller hosting account is not so limited. You can add as many accounts to it as the hosting company has room for on its server!
I personally have two reseller accounts where I have my own domains spread out between them. It makes maintaining and administrating each domain much easier than with the more popular shared hosting account, where if you want to add multiple domains, you have to add them as “add-on” domains under the one account. There is a problem with that setup and I’ll explain that.
If you have more than one domain occupying a shared hosting account, under normal day to day running you should have no problems at all as long as each domain you host on there stays within certain operating parameters, such as the amount of bandwidth it uses and how much processing resources it uses. Problems start to occur when one of your domains either suddenly starts getting a load of traffic and stars eating up bandwidth, or has a script running that suddenly starts hoarding system resources.
Your host provider will suddenly take an interest in your account, you can count on it! If you start hogging too many resources, your account could get suspended until you do something about it, such as upgrading your hosting if its a bandwidth thing, or fixing your scrip if its swallowing up system resources. The upshot of this is that if you have multiple websites on their own domains all together on this shared host, they will all be taken down with the offending domain. That could mean your business going down the drain overnight until you can sort it out.
Downtime like that, even if its 24 hours can seriously damage some businesses!
This is much less likely to happen if you take out a reseller account. Because of its structure, you host each domain on its own account within your overall reseller. What this means is that if one domain starts hogging resources, only that domain gets singled out, not your whole reseller account. That means all the other domains keep active and your business carries on uninterrupted. The domain that is causing problems can be administrated by you by increasing its bandwidth allocation, which you can do within the bounds of your overall allocation. Of course if its running a bad script, your host will let you know and you can disable the individual account before any real damage is done,while all your other accounts remain active.
This level of flexibility is what attracts so many people to reseller accounts, especially those who own multiple domains and need their business to keep going without the potential problems associated with standard shared hosting packages.
Regular readers here will, by now I’m sure be quite aware of the hosting company that I endorse, but don’t dis-count other companies as there are many good ones to choose from. Discount Domains are one such company that are based in the UK and cater for most online business types. They have a good customer support section and will help you one to one if ever you need them. Discount Domains are a popular UK ICANN registrar and well worth checking out as an alternative to the usual suspects.
Whatever you do with your business, work hard, stay focused, keep at it and above all else…
Never give up!
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