When establishing an online presence for your online business, there are hundreds of different ways to move forward and grow your business.
For beginners, these options are both boon and a curse as it is great to have a lot of varieties but it is confusing as well. Among the pool of hundreds of web hosts, there are other different web hosting plans.
Which web hosting platform is suitable for your website? Which plans should you choose? How much should you invest in a particular plan?
These are the questions that roam in anyone’s mind before creating the online business and these are very reasonable as well.
Here, in this article, I have discussed the in-depth comparison between two of the most popular web hosting plans in the market, that is, Shared Hosting, and Reseller Hosting.
What is Web Hosting?
Before we get into the different types of web hosting and the definitions in detail, first, it is important to know what web hosting is.
Web hosting is a business that provides favorable resources, technologies, and services to host a website on the internet. To store the website content you need a special computer known as the server.
To surf your website content on the internet, all the users need to do is enter your website’s URLs or domain names on their web browser.
The web browser sends the request to your server and the web contents are served from your server and are viewed in the user’s web browser.
Web Hosting service is extremely necessary to make your business online and public for your users to surf from anywhere and anytime.
You need several resources to host your business online and most of them if not all are offered to you by the web hosts.
Types of Web Hosting
There are multiple web hosting plans that you can choose from either offered by a single web host or from the multiple web hosts.
There are various types of web hosting plans and making the choice of the one that fits best for your online business is always confusing. Here, I have listed the different types of web hosting plans that you could choose from.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the simplest and the cheapest web hosting plans among all of the different types of plans. As the name suggests, Shared Hosting works by sharing the resources of a single physical server to multiple users.
Hence, it is useful for those businesses which are relatively new and have fewer visitors. Once your website starts getting more traffic then you might want to switch to another web hosting plan.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud Hosting is a new concept in the hosting market and is a buzzword in the technology world as well. All of your website content and hosting resources are provided to you by a cloud platform.
This allows users to work with as many resources as they want without having the need to employ their own computing infrastructure.
Managed Hosting
Managed Hosting is the type of hosting in which all the hosting packages are managed by the hosting provider itself.
The plans provide all the technical services such as hardware and software configurations and setups, patching, updating, monitoring, maintenance, hardware support, and technical support.
VPS Hosting
VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting is the type of hosting service right in between the shared service and dedicated service.
It is ideal for the website owners who are not ready to commit to a dedicated server but still need a little more control over their business.
VPS hosting shared the physical server with other users but still, the website is hosting in its own space of the server.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting is the most expensive and complex hosting plan that is offered by most of the web host service providers.
This plan offers the website owners the most control over the server as a whole physical server is given to the single user. That is, the server stores only one, that is, your website on it offering full control and admin access to you.
Reseller Hosting
Reseller Hosting is a unique type of hosting plan that is different than any other where you can buy a web hosting that includes a hard drive, RAM, and CPU and sells it to other clients.
The features and prices of the web hosting plans can be changed by the third-party sellers. The web hosting plan is perfect for those who are new in the industry and for entrepreneurs as well.
Colocation Hosting
As the name suggests, Colocation Hosting refers to the type of hosting service where you are allowed to choose to co-locate your equipment by renting space.
The renting space is located in the colocated center and the center provides its customers with the bandwidth, power, IP address, and cooling systems that your server requires.
Shared Hosting Vs. Reseller Hosting – Comparison
Shared Hosting and Reseller Hosting are quite similar to one another and the only difference is the involvement of the third-party apps in the Reseller Hosting.
Here, I have compared the two extremely similar hosting services, that is, Shared Hosting, and Reseller Hosting on the features you would want to look for in a web hosting plan.
Who uses each
Shared hosting is suitable for business owners who need a simple way to make their website online. You do not have control over the resources but you can take care of the design, domain management, and email setup.
Reseller hosting is ideal for freelancing developers who want to host multiple sites, technical entrepreneurs who want to take their web hosting to the next level, and/or serial startup owners who anticipate launching various projects.
Once you purchase the resource from the host, you can sell or reallocate those resources to other clients as it matches their requirements.
cPanel
Both Shared, as well as Reseller Hosting, provides its users with the cPanel. However, shared hosting uses the normal cPanel while the reseller hosting uses a WHM or Web Host Manager cPanel.
cPanel or Control Panel gives the users access to all the management options on your websites. The management option is provided for emails, domains, SSH users/keys, backups, and databases.
Number of sites
Most of the shared hosting plans offer the ability to host only one website on a basic plan but you can host the unlimited websites on the premium rate on some web host.
On the other hand, the reseller hosting plan can host more than one site from a single website. In these cases, reseller hosting is quite equipped with services as you get the added perks of personal name servers.
Reseller hosting allows you to reallocate resources as long as the requirements match and unless you do not cause any issues to your host. The problem includes Input/Output or CPU bottlenecking.
Performance
Shared hosting, as the name suggests, shares the server resources, that is, bandwidth, storage, RAM, and most of the things with other users.
It comes with a central risk and reward at the same time. So it is not rocket science to understand that there are a finite number of resources in a shared hosting platform.
Although most of the shared hosting plans include unlimited resources as one of their features it is not true. The web hosts know that when someone chooses a shared plan, they will never come close to these bandwidths and hence, it is a good marketing strategy.
However, the case is quite different with the reseller hosting. You can use as many resources as you require but you have to allocate it right at first.
Also, although shared hosting provides enough resources to operate a website if you want to work with multiple sites then, reseller hosting is the choice you should make.
Security
Shared hosting service providers install software specifically working towards protecting your website. However, it does not guarantee 100% security as the server is shared by multiple users.
If your website suffers an attack, all the other website hosted from that server gets affected and vice versa.
The case is not the same for reseller hosting. Here, you buy a server with a certain bandwidth, storage, and other resources and resell it to third party buyers.
Price
It shouldn’t be surprising that the added resources, control, and other opportunities that come with reseller hosting hikes up the price of reseller hosting as compared to the shared hosting.
Shared hosting is the cheapest hosting plans among many other hosting plans, it typically costs you $2 – $5 per month. It is a very impressive price rate with the number of features and resources you can get.
Reseller hosting comes with the control and power over the server and can manage several websites on an upgraded server. You do not need to be an Einstien to know that it is more expensive.
The plan typically starts around $15 – $20 per month.
Conclusion
There are very different uses of both of the hosting plans. Shared hosting is used mostly by beginners who are just starting their online business while reseller hosting is used to resell the hosting resources to multiple users after buying a server with bigger capabilities.
You can use the reseller hosting to host your own multiple websites if you have multiple businesses to run. They work in a similar pattern yet are so different.
However, your requirements play an important role in choosing the one among these two.