Reseller hosting is one of the several kinds of hosting services. Everyone involved in eCommerce seeks for a particular hosting service which can cater to the needs of his business. Unlike dedicated and shared hosting, reseller hosting is more cost-effective. It is in fact a service provided by a user who previously has a hosting service. Reseller hosting thus is leased to other users at higher cost. This is analogous to the large companies that buy a hosting service with considerable bandwidth and space and lease a part of it to other firms. In simple terms, it is all about renting disk space and bandwidth to a number of companies.

One of the most common questions I get from my newsletter subscribers is if they should use reseller hosting. Not surprisingly, many new and experienced marketers aren't sure what kind of hosting they should be using for their online business. While the answers can vary from one individual to the next, it is always a good idea to understand what your options are so you can make an informed decision.

The two most common hosting plans used by most online marketers are shared and reseller packages. Some marketers require their own dedicated servers, but this is really only an option you should pursue when your online presence has grown too large to handle normal bandwidth and disk space. As an example, the owner of an online forum that receives 100,000 visitors a day would need a dedicated server to handle the enormous bandwidth of that much daily traffic.

However, for a majority of online marketers, shared and reseller packages are the most popular choices. Each of these plans come with various options that can suit the needs of almost any small to medium online business. Now the question is, which is right for your online business?

If you are just starting out and only have one or two websites with minimal traffic, then a shared hosting plan is more than adequate enough. Since reseller hosting starts at around $25 a month and quality shared hosting starts around $4.95, we can use simple math to discover that a reseller-hosting plan isn't right for your business.

Now if you own multiple websites and are planning on adding more in the future, then it is time to make the economical move to a reseller plan. With a standard reseller plan you will have around 24 gb of disk space and 250 gb of bandwidth every month. To put this into perspective, an average Website uses less than 2gb of bandwidth and 75 mb of disk space a month.

Again, by using simple math, it is easy to see you can have 50 or more medium sized websites hosted under this plan. This is perfect for marketers who want to create multiple niche websites for affiliate marketing.

As you can see, shared hosting vs. reseller hosting doesn't have to be confusing. As always, an educated marketer is an empowered marketer.