If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

What is the first thing that you need to consider when you plan to set up a website? You actually have two options: to buy a web server and the other equipments required for its support and even employing a technician to help you run it OR look for a company that is in the business of running websites for others in return of a monthly fees as they will use their equipments for hosting your website. Even a small child can tell what you should choose between the two to avoid investing huge amount on the set up required for your personal website server infrastructure (unless you are a big company who can afford such expenses). This leaves you with an option to go for renting a server space from a web hosting company. How simple!

Not really. Once you start shopping around for web hosting services, they have several different options to choose from. One of the first big decisions to make is if you want shared or reseller web hosting. But what exactly is the difference?

In a nutshell, the difference is scale. In shared web hosting, you rent server space for a single website with a single domain name. You would pay a separate monthly fee for each additional website you set up. In reseller web hosting, you rent a large amount of web hosting server space, divide it up among as many websites as you need, and then have the option to resell the left over server space to other people to set up websites-essentially making you a web hosting subcontractor. So which option should you choose? There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and we’ll examine each below.

The main advantages of shared web hosting is that it is simple, cheap, and efficient on a small scale. For a personal or small business website, this is all you will need. You get one website and one domain name, often with the option to set up sub-domains for the different parts of your website. First, you are not only renting space on their web server equipment, you were renting their support. It is the responsibility of your web hosting provider to keep your website constantly accessible and running smoothly, and provide you with any technical support you might need-making this one less issue, you have to worry about when running your own business. Second, shared web hosting is five to twenty times cheaper than reseller web hosting, with prices ranging as low as $5 per month, or even free.

There are drawbacks to free web hosting sites, however. The main one is reliability. As you are not a paying customer, if the site goes down, all you can do is wait. You have no contract guaranteeing you a set response time for internet outages. Free web hosting is great for a personal website, but if you’re running a small business where your website needs to be available 24/7/365 and you need quick, reliable support for any and technical problems, then you’ll definitely want to go with a paid shared web host. The costs vary depending on how big your web site is, and how much web traffic you anticipate. The web hosting company Hostgator, for example, offers three shared web hosting packages varying between $4.95 and $12.95 a month. Finally, if you want to set up another website, you have to buy another shared web hosting plan, and your monthly expenses have just doubled.

Reseller web hosting is more flexible and has a major advantage of economies of scale. If your business is expanding or you are running multiple businesses then you will have you pay a lot for renting multiple shared web hosting every month. But if you choose reseller web hosting, you will be able to set up as many websites as you require.. Even after they grow, you can relocate the resources among them. You can also utilise the left over space by renting it to other small businesses or individuals. With proper planning, you will realize that the reseller web hosting will prove to be cheaper that shred web hosting on a large scale.

The main disadvantage of reseller web hosting is its cost. You can get the Hostgator shared web hosting package at the cost of $5 to $13 per month but the reseller web hosting package will cost you $25 to $100 for each month depending on your website’s size and traffic. You can reduce this expenditure if you sell the unused space to someone else but then there is no surety that you fill find someone to but it. You may not find a customer when you want one. It is possible that in some months you will have to pay for all the space even when you don’t use all of it.

Another problem is that when you sell the free space to someone, you have to provide him support whenever there is a problem. Since you yourself have no control over such technical problems, it becomes a major problem. You can provide some kind of administrative help but problems like an Internet outage will not get solved by you without the help of your web-hosting provider. When you are unable to help them, you will end up losing not only the confidence of your customers but the customers too. They will shift to other web-hosting provider and you will ruin your name in the business. This will have adverse effect on the financial conditions of your business.

Tags: Business

Popularity: 3% [?]

Share This