Nowadays, reseller hosting has become a fairly common concept in the world of web hosting. Many users rely on reseller packages for starting their own web hosting businesses — it is fairly simple, as all you have to do is handle billing and provide support to your clients, with your own web hosting company handling issues such as server monitoring, uptime and maintenance, etc.
Even if you do not wish to run a reseller web hosting business, reseller hosting is an ideal pick if you have multiple websites to take care of. Each website gets its own control panel and share of resources in a reseller package, such that the issues faced by one website — compromised scripts, traffic hike or anything else — are not faced by the other websites on the account.
That said, there is another concept that is being projected of late as a viable choice in this field: master reseller web hosting.
What is it all about? And is master reseller hosting worth the trouble? In this article, we seek answers to these questions.
Are Master Reseller Plans Worth The Money?
What is Master Reseller Hosting?
We already know what reseller hosting is: basically, you purchase a reseller plan, and then you can create a specific number of shared hosting accounts within that plan.
Thus, if your reseller plan offers you 200 GB of storage, you can create 20 shared hosting accounts, each with 10 GB of storage, or 10 shared hosting accounts, each with 20 GB of storage, and so on. As a result, if you are running or managing multiple websites, rather than purchasing an independent shared account for each site, you can go with one reseller plan and add your sites therein.
Obviously, just because the name implies “reseller”, you need not resell hosting; you can even use reseller plans to host your own sites.
Master reseller hosting, on the other hand, lets you create shared accounts, as well as reseller accounts within your reseller package. As a result, you can also offer reseller hosting packages to your own clients, and sell them much like you would sell shared hosting packages.
The Reality of Master Reseller Hosting
Master reseller hosting plans are attractive for many users as well as web hosts — you can not only resell shared plans, but also reseller plans, thereby enhancing chances of revenue and offering additional plans for your clients.
In other words, master reseller hosting plans are ideal for folks who truly wish to resell web hosting. Offering just shared hosting plans might not make you ample revenue, owing to lesser pricing of shared plans. However, offering reseller plans right next to shared plans can boost your revenue, assuming those reseller plans convert well.
But is master reseller hosting really that good?
Apparently not.
Master reseller hosting, in spite of all of its potential to make one rich, is rarely feasible and stable in the long run. At the very best, it performs well only if your parent web host has fewer clients. For all other practical cases, master reseller hosting does not live up to the hype.
Why?
Well, consider this example. Let us say, you purchase a master reseller hosting plan from any given web host, and then create reseller plans on your account, and sell them off to 100 customers.
Now, those 100 customers, in turn, each sell shared hosting plans to their own customers. Let us say, each of the 100 customers manages to sell 100 shared hosting plans.
If you do the Maths here, it is obvious that there are now 100×100=10,000 customers on the server. You are monitoring and keeping track of 100 reseller plans in your master reseller account, but in reality, 10,000 accounts exist as each of your clients has added clients of his or her own.
Naturally, this model is a strain on even the most powerful of servers. Furthermore, you must bear in mind that the parent web host, the one from whom you purchased your own master reseller plan, will probably be adding further clients on the same server, and most likely, they all will be master resellers. As a result, it is barely a matter of time before the server gets severely overcrowded, and the performs falters for all the accounts and users on that server. You will be answering to your clients about the drop in performance, who in turn will be answering to their clients.
As we can see, master reseller hosting, albeit the grand potential for success, is barely feasible and can actually hamper the performance of the server. Such exponential rise in the number of accounts (master reseller plans, sub-reseller plans, shared plans, and so on) can lead to a drop in performance of even the mightiest of dedicated servers, and if your parent host is running master reseller plans on a VPS or something weaker, you can expect enormous amount of downtime and loss of business.
Conclusion
In simple words, master reseller hosting is a bad idea, and you will surely be better off purchasing a bigger reseller plan with additional resources. If you need to add more and more websites, go with a reseller plan that offers ample room for the number of sites that you need to run.
If, however, you do wish to sell reseller hosting packages to your clients, we recommend getting a Cloud Server or a Managed Dedicated Server. Both allow you to offer and sell reseller hosting plans, without the disadvantages mentioned above. Plus, if you choose Fully Managed by Jolt then we take care of the technical side in managing and running the server itself.