Your website is the best marketing tool that you’ll ever have. Offering an always-open showroom to prospective customers, your website never sleeps. Or at least, it shouldn’t do.
As many business owners have discovered to their cost, there’s much more to a successful website that how good it looks. The speed with which pages load is crucial, of course, but other factors are just as important. Pages that are optimised for smartphones as well as laptops and desktops, for example. And clear, relevant content, accompanied by intuitive navigation.
But even if all those website essentials are in place, there’s still something that’s much more important to take into consideration. The quality of your website hosting service. Problems with the site’s servers or periods of downtime can seriously compromise the reputation of your business. And as every business owner or manager knows, it’s difficult to recover when customers lose faith in your brand.
So it’s clear that your choice of hosting provider is an absolutely crucial element when it comes to building your own website. But how can you ensure that you’re getting the best hosting service for your needs? And of course, you’ll need to be sure that the service will be scalable too, so it can grow along with your company. There’s no point working on building up an online presence only to find that your hosting service can’t cope once the visitors start rolling in.
If you’ve got a pretty good basic understanding of how websites and servers operate, but you don’t have the money to invest in state-of-the-art equipment yourself, then reseller web hosting could be just what you need.
What is reseller web hosting?
When you’ve built a website – which is so easy using drag and drop technology, that just about anyone can master the basics in just a couple of hours – you need to get it in front of an audience. To do that, your site needs to be uploaded to a server. Servers are specialised computers, highly complex pieces of technology which need to be kept in dust-free, temperature-controlled environments for the best results. You can buy personal ones, but they’re highly unlikely to offer the necessary functions you require as your business grows. And besides, you’re then completely at the mercy of power outages and the quality and longevity of that particular unit.
So most businesses turn to hosting services to publish their websites online. Operating out of large data centres, with teams of technicians watching over them night and day, they offer unrivalled levels of performance and security.
Small businesses and bloggers usually opt for a cost-effective, low-budget shared hosting option. The hosting service allocates a tiny portion of a server to each business, taking care of every aspect of the site’s online performance.
But reseller hosting offers a much more comprehensive package, putting control firmly in the hands of the website owner. Here, the hosting company ‘rents’ a portion of its server space to a customer for a set fee. That customer then downloads their own control panel, giving them overall management of the website back to the owner.
Reseller hosting also enables designers and developers, for example, to set up and run websites on behalf of their own customers. This enables these businesses to provide added value to their own clients at minimum costs to themselves.
Is there a catch to reseller web hosting?
There isn’t really a catch to reseller web hosting, if you have a reasonable understanding of what’s involved. You’ll need to be prepared to put in some time to master the control panel, and to discover what you can do to manage your website, or sites.
A reseller hosting package is ideal for small businesses that put together websites for other people, but it’s so much more than that. For the single business owner, reseller web hosting puts full control into their own hands. The control panel allows the user to decide when and how to undertake backups.
Websites that experience high volumes of traffic or that contain hundreds of pages may work best using a reseller web hosting package. And it’s the perfect option if your business model requires you to spread yourself across multiple sites too. That’s because reseller hosting offers added-value multi-site features, along with much more space for your sites to expand and grow. Your hosting service provider should also provide you with SSL certification, as well as a dedicated account manager to offer advice and support as needed.
