Finding the Perfect Website Hosting Reseller: A Checklist
There are tons of website hosting reseller accounts up for grabs on the Net. There are quite a few based offshore, even, promising highly competitive rates and excellent service. In this mess of cyber-promotion and information, how can you be sure that you can make a balanced, objective analysis of all the options available to you?
Here is a short checklist of things that many first-time buyers make for themselves when they are shopping for resellers. It may help you narrow down your choices of website hosting reseller vendors:
1) Budget. How much are you willing to spend regularly on web space? There should be reseller accounts that offer only the features that suit your budget.
2) Space and bandwidth. Estimate the amount of web space you will need. Depending on the use you have in mind, you could start off with only 100 mb of space (say for a brochure-type website composed purely of static pages). But if you plan to upload large files into your web space, you should definitely think larger. 1gb of space is already considered small by hardcore file sharers.
If you also plan to have many other people download and upload large files into your server, 1gb worth of bandwidth may not be enough. Start off with 5gb of transfer or more. But if you don't plan on having much traffic, less than 1gb should be okay. Note that web hosts usually take down your site if you exceed the allocated transfer limit, so keep a close eye on your bandwidth!
3) Extra Features. Do you plan to put up an online store? Do you want freedom to play around with web scripts? An even more basic concern would be: Do you want to have your own domain name? Not every reseller offers domain hosting.
You need to ask if your prospective website hosting resellers support certain scripts and settings. Many servers have CGI, PHP and MySQL enabled, but a lot of resellers opt not to install paid server-side stuff like ASP, Cold Fusion, and merchant accounts - and that's how they get so cheap. This is why cheaper is not necessarily better for reseller web space.