What is a Reseller ?

A reseller is a middle-man who sells web space on somebody else's server. Reselling schemes vary widely.

They fall into the following categories:

(a) The reseller acts as an agent for the web hosting company. The service is advertised by the reseller as being with the actual web hosting company. People buy direct from the web hosting company but the reseller gets a cut if customers mention the reseller's name.

(b) The reseller acts as a marketer for the web hosting company. The service is advertised by the reseller as being with the actual web hosting company. People buy the service from the reseller but all further contact they have is direct wih the web hosting company.

(c) The reseller appears to be a web hosting company in his own right, handling sales and support but 'rebadges' somebody else's service. A customer buys web space from the reseller who buys web space (at a lower price) from the actual web hosting company. Customers contact the reseller for support.

A variant on this scheme is that customers are invoiced by the web hosting company in the reseller's name and the reseller gets a cut. Support will usually be via the reseller in order to keep up the pretence that the reseller is a web hosting company in his own right.

(d) The reseller purchases a large chunk of web space and bandwidth from the web hosting company and can then carve that into individual chunks of space/bandwidth for sale to customers. Customers contact the reseller for support.

Should I Buy From Resellers?

Of the schemes above, (a) and (b) carry the least risk and give the best support (assuming the web space company is competent).

Schemes (c) and (d) often attract "web design" companies who have little technical knowledge beyond using the latest HTML authoring tool but who want to increase the amount of money they make and/or provide "a complete solution" - when you require support you deal with a middleman who has get back to you after contacting the real web hosting company.

However, you may get better prices on these schemes than by going to a real web hosting company who run their own server because the reseller will be able to field the less techy support questions and thereby reduce the web space company's support costs.

The jury's out on this one, but the problems with resellers are:

(a) They don't own their own equipment, so if it goes wrong they can't do anything about it.

(b) They usually cannot handle technical support questions beyond "what is my username - I forgot it", and sometimes can't even cope with that. Anything more technical and they have to get back to you after contacting the real web hosting company. And the chances are high that they'll garble some of the details and the answer they come back with is the wrong answer to a completely different question.

(c) We've yet to meet a clueful reseller.

Resellers might be alright, when used in conjunction with value added services or when you're buying a complete package of web page design plus web space.

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