When I started my web design business and was looking for a host, I first learned about reseller accounts. The host I’m with now has a great one, but not everyone may be familiar with what this entails…

What is a reseller hosting account? Generally, that means that you purchase web server space with a host, then you’re free to sell that space in whatever increments you choose and at the price you set. And typically you’ll have some kind of hosting control panel where you can set up hosting packages and prices and manage your hosting clients - up to the point of monitoring the bandwidth they’re using each month, and upgrading/downgrading or suspending if necessary.

For example, if I purchase a reseller account with 20 gb of space, I can sell 20 1gb accounts or 40 500 mb accounts and so on to my web design clients. I pay for the original account, but my clients all pay me for their accounts too. It definitely pays for itself very quickly, and the ability to oversee my clients’ hosting accounts all from one control panel is a big time saving benefit.

This is so much easier than just setting up a client with their own hosting account and of course keeps me in the loop when they need to upgrade and renew!

Yes, I know it’s been way too long since I last posted. I do know. But things have been very busy lately; we were working on getting our retail site ready for the holidays, and holiday shopping is now in full swing.

Over Thanksgiving (and I mean all fricking day), we did testing on the speed of the retail site’s server and found it was performing at a level of ‘poor’ or ‘fair’ all the time. So I decided (maybe with not quite enough forethought) that a virtual private server (VPS) might be the answer. I thought we were bogging down due to the sum total of activity on the shared server and that switching to one where we’d have a guaranteed amount of space and bandwidth all the time might be better.

I’ve talked before about how happy I was with my current host. Their tech support was outstanding - until a few days before Thanksgiving when I opened up the VPS account.

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