Best Reseller Hosting UK

UK Reseller Hosting: Digging Deeper

What is Reseller Hosting?

When one company, the hosting provider, decides to rent their bandwidth and hard drive space to another smaller business who then goes on to rent that space to a third-party smaller business, this is reseller web hosting. Essentially, it is providing your own clients with hosting as if you are the website hosting company yourself.

This is a very common practice in the UK for designers and website developers who are looking to brand themselves with additional services, like UK web hosting,  as well as with entrepreneurs who are aspiring to create their own business web hosting.

Related comparisons:

• Best Reseller Hosting Australia
• Best Reseller Hosting
• Best WordPress Hosting UK

Things to Look Out for when Researching Reseller Hosting:

Cost

One of the more slippery aspects of getting your plan up and running is figuring out how much you can spend on it (and no, there’s no free UK web hosting available for resellers). When you are first starting out, it might seem like the best course of action to simply look for the cheapest plan – this isn’t necessarily your ideal option. Everyone has their own individual needs, so the best plan for you will depend on several different factors such as how much server space you want to sell and how much you are planning on charging starting clients.

When working this out, it is generally recommended to give larger clients around 10Gb of space, medium clients around 3Gb, and the smaller ones only really need around 1Gb. Fortunately, space tends to be a bigger hassle than bandwidth limitations.

Bandwidth/Disk Space

Proper amounts of bandwidth are fairly common to find in UK hosting companies, which is why disk space is what you should be watching for. This will be a major deciding factor when you determine the number of clients that your reseller hosting plan can handle (definitely if you’re hosting a lot of e-commerce sites), although the number of accounts allowed is also important.

cPanel/WHM Available

cPanel is a control panel that is the basic industry standard, and with Web Host Manager (WHM), users are able to manage cPanel accounts and create new ones when they need to. This is why it is important for UK reseller hosts to have WHM – with this, they are able to set limitations, set up packages, view usage statistics, downgrade or upgrade accounts, and much more. The easier the account management system being used, the simpler the overall job will be. Even the basic plans should include this.

Server Locations

Every bit of information on the internet is being physically hosted at a location somewhere. Generally, it is best to keep your server location in the same country as the clients you cater to – if they are in the UK, look for a server within the country. There are cheaper plans available overseas, and these can sometimes be very viable options; however, something to keep in mind with these value plans is that the quality of customer support may be much lower than you’d hope for.

Uptime

The amount of time that a server remains online and running is the uptime. If the uptime is too spotty, whoever is visiting the website will immediately leave the page and find a competitor whose site works more efficiently. When shopping for a plan and finding ones that offer 99.9% uptime, just do some additional research to make sure that their reports are accurate as this is not a category that you want to skimp on.

Customer Support

High-quality customer support is very important in this industry because, without fail, something will always go wrong when you least expect it. Whether it is a surprise episode of down-time or a bandwidth issue, the last thing you want to do is not be able to access customer support because they don’t offer 24/7 assistance or, possibly worse, deal with customer support that actually isn’t helpful at all.

One of the areas that you want to check off for a good level of customer service is 24/7 live chat and phone support. If you decide on the cheapest hosting company out there, obviously the support level will be lacking quite a bit.

Number of Allowed Accounts

The number of clients that you are able to get set up is another important factor in selecting a hosting plan. A lot of the time, this is partially dependent on the amount of space you have as you have to split it up amongst your clients and make sure that they have enough space to run their respective sites. For example, you could invest in a plan that offers more clients but less space for each client, such as one with a maximum of 25 accounts with 50Gb total, which would give each client 2Gb.

Finding a nice balance between the number of accounts and allotment of space can be tricky, but once you figure out what your goal is it is simple to proceed to the next step.

Other Features

A few other features to keep an eye out for include:

• RAM – at least 500mb, but 1Gb is recommended
• Disk IO – a good number to look for is 2mb per second
• CPU – how many cores do you need and how many does it have?
• Server Speed – how fast is it, SSD or LiteSpeed?
• Daily Backups – crucial for security purposes

Being able to easily install WordPress and Joomla is also very helpful, although these should already come with the Cpanel package. If budget limitations aren’t an issue for you, a powerful VPS can be incredibly helpful for the security of your server. Another expensive feature that is worth it if you have the money to spend is investing in a dedicated server.

OR