With small businesses mushrooming everywhere, and with each of them keen on online presence, number of web hosting companies saw a staggering growth. But for most small businesses, dealing with a big specialist host was not always the ideal choice.  With their limited technical skills, they wanted someone close to home, would listen to their needs and were always accessible. This contributed to the concept of reseller hosting.

Web development firms and freelance web designers etc. were the first people to jump into reseller hosting. It provided them an extra income and also helped them make the clients stick to them for long.

Over the past decade or so, the reseller arrangement itself went through several transitions. Today there are different variants of the reseller arrangement. In one such arrangement, the reseller merely acts as an agent of the web hosting company. For all its scouting around, advertising, and interacting with prospective customers the reseller gets a commission, essentially a percentage of the sale value. However, each sale is for, and on behalf of, the main web hosting company itself.

Another arrangement is where the reseller acts like the web hosting company’s marketing outfit. All the advertising and marketing is done in the name of the web hosting company. Customers are free to buy any plan and they also have the choice of buying from the reseller or directly from the web hosting company. As far as the customers are concerned, there is no difference; and in either case it is as if they have bought the plan from the web hosting company itself. All the subsequent interactions, including technical support, are with the web hosting company.

Yet another arrangement is a typical business model in which the reseller buys a huge amount of space as well as bandwidth, quite obviously at a very low rate, from the web hosting company. Having done so, the reseller is at liberty to sell disk space and bandwidth in smaller units. The reseller sells these smaller units at a much higher per unit cost to the end customer. The difference between the two rates is the reseller’s profit.

To the end customer who merely wants the website to be hosted, any of these reseller arrangements is good enough, and technically makes no difference. However, all these resellers are not equally professional, either technically or with regard to support. They are basically small companies with fairly low stakes as compared with the main web hosting company. It is in the individual customers’ interests to verify the credentials of these resellers before signing up with them.