Shared Hosting or Reseller Hosting – Which Do You Choose?

The vast majority of cPanel web hosting companies offer “shared” hosting as the default for people looking for web hosting. So how “useful” is this for a business, especially if you want to have MORE than just one web site?

Well let’s look at the options with that cheap (around $10/mth) single user shared hosting plan that might allow you to use extra domains…

Does your plan include any ADD-ON DOMAINS at all? If it does NOT include these, then you can only host ONE website on that server.

Let’s NOT confuse these with SUBDOMAINS – i.e. subdomain.yourdomain.com – Here, while you can set up a different site, it is still a “child” of yourdomain.com

Similarly, don’t get confused by PARKing another domain name on top of your main one – i.e. anyrequest for parkeddomain.com will go straight over to yourdomain.com – because you can not set up an additional site this way.

So if you want to set up MORE than one website then check your options very closely.

If your hosting plan includes ADD-ON domains, then that means you can run extra websites with their own domain names on that server.

Now… while that might seem OK… remember that each site does NOT have a separate login. They all run using the master login for the main domain on the server. They all need to be configured (email, stats etc) through the master control panel for that server.

And they can only be backed up when you do a backup for the whole server!

In effect, they are really NOT separate “entities” as such, even though they may show up as different websites.

And therein lies the MAIN PROBLEM with using add-on domains!

There are other problems related to the number of domains you have tied to a single account which MAY begin to cause problems on a shared service, which COULD result in your account being closed down for “abuse” if any one of these sites starts getting even slightly “busy”!!!

Reseller Hosting

On a server which offers cPanel RESELLER hosting however, you can set up individual accounts for each web site you have by logging in to the “Webhost Manager” for your server.

Here, each domain has its own login, own cPanel, own stats etc…

And the REALLY good thing is… each individual website can now be:

  1. turned off if any abuse issues happen – without getting your “master” account disabled (hopefully)
  2. backed up on a “per site” basis, and even
  3. easily MOVED to another server/webhost if required in event of any problems (abuse, hardware failures etc) with your hosting company
  4. sold to a third party (either moved to their hosting, or left it in place and you charge the buyer for hosting)

Note that regarding points 2 and 3, with cPanel hosting it is easy to backup and restore, or even move to another server, BUT ONLY IF you have these individual accounts.

If you only have a server with the add-on option… then all domains come under the main account, and you have one big backup file… which is pretty useless for a move!

Sure… reseller hosting is a little more expensive… (probably around $20+ a month) and still uses “shared” resources from the hosting company… but the flexibility the individual accounts give you, especially if/when you have 5, or 10 or 20 or more domains… is well worth it!

And if any one site starts getting too busy for the shared hosting environment, you can easily move it or upgrade to a different server/plan where it won’t have those issues.

Conclusion

Picking a cheaper, single user shared hosting plan – say under $10 a month – may not offer the options you need later on, especially if you are considering running more than a couple of websites.

Reseller hosting however, with the individual accounts for each website, gives you more flexibility to quickly react to unknown future hosting issues that may arise.

Personally, I don’t think saving $10 a month is worth it 🙂

Cheers
Stephen Spry

(this is an updated repost of an article I wrote several years ago, which seems to have disappeared from my site…. hmmm!)

By Stephen Spry · Filed Under Web Hosting 

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