Shared vs. Reseller – What Hosting Do I Need?

Bottom line up front:

Generally speaking, shared web hosting is best for single websites, but can be used for more in certain situations. Reseller web hosting is designed for those who plan on hosting multiple websites for their clients and customers or have requirements to ensure isolation between websites and guaranteed resources for each customer. Read below for further clarification on when to use each.

Shared:

Shared hosting accounts typically consist of a single username in order to access the hosting account & data. You may/may not be able to add multiple websites/domains onto a shared hosting account depending on the plan that you choose however, you would only have one login for accessing this hosting account. Additional websites/domains would be added as addon domains, sub-domains or parked domains.

Shared hosting plans are typically a good choice for those with single websites, business websites or those who just have a few websites. When adding multiple websites onto a shared hosting account, it’s important to note that a shared hosting account is assigned a specific amount of resources – CPU, Memory, Processes etc. This means each additional website will share those resources with the other websites/domains you have on this single account.

There are two large downsides to having multiple websites under the same hosting account as addon domains, parked domains or sub-domains: Performance & Security. With performance, each website located on the same “single” hosting account is forced to shared the resources available with each of your addon domains. This means that if you have 10 websites (and your hosting account has for example 2GB of memory), each website can potentially fight each other for their share of memory. When it comes to security, in the event one of the addon domains, parked or sub-domains becomes compromised, it can potentially put the entire shared hosting account at risk since everything is running as the same user account. When there are multiple websites being used, we generally recommend reseller hosting.

Reseller:

Reseller hosting allows the account holder to utilize a control panel called “Web Host Manager” or “WHM” for short, to control multiple individual cPanel hosting accounts. These are great solutions for those with multiple websites, website designers/developers or those who wish to resell web hosting. When creating multiple individual cPanel accounts you’re effectively removing some of the performance & security concerns listed above by separating your websites onto their own cPanel accounts. This means each account will have its own set of resources assigned to it as well as its own username/password & system user account.

A few added benefits to having reseller web hosting is you have the following abilities:

• Further DNS Zone modification
• Able to use private/branded nameservers
• WHMCS hosting billing software

The biggest benefit to having a reseller plan is being able to separate websites into their own cPanel accounts & is certainly what we recommend when managing multiple websites. This is especially important if you plan to provide services to other companies/businesses and if you plan to host websites for your customers.