In this edition “Getting to the Root of IT”, we look at the next logical step on the ever ascending ladder of hosting – a Reseller Account.
As a remainder, last time we discussed Shared Hosting being like having a bed in a hostel, functional for renting for a night’s sleep however you are subject to all manner of complications including the fallout of a hostel party!
A Reseller Account is a platform that would usually allow someone like .e.g a developer to provide multiple clients shared hosting, hence being the natural step up in terms of examples.
Reseller Accounts to me are like hiring out an entire hostel wing or room. Your resources are static in the sense that the room is a fixed entity however you can use the beds and arrange them as you wish. Want to give 4 bed/shared hosting users a fairly quiet time? Or do you want to pack the beds in to maximise profit with problems be damned.
You still have shared resources to manage and you most definitely will have other reseller/hostel wing owners to contend with in terms of noise, however, it can also be a more cost effective way of hosting multiple of your own sites/people than just hiring out the beds individually.
If this hostel room/wing was part of a larger hotel for example, you would still receive less of a service than a dedicated hotel room and there would most likely be more rules imposed on you still being a shared facility, which is very much akin to what is offered under reseller hosting.
Resellers also usually come with some form of control panel which on occasion may actually be part of the actual servers control panel (which may give more control) however like shared hosting it can also be a web based, provider panel.
At the time of writing, reseller accounts seem to be on the way out with the ever increasing momentum behind cloud (and therefore technologies like Application as a service) however they have been a staple of the internet for such a long time that it will take equal time to erode away.
Want to take a step up on the ladder? Next time we tackle the world of virtual (not cloud) servers….
