When discussing the Reseller Web Hosting Market  and which hosting company has the best Reseller plans, the discussion should be broken into two parts. There are really 2 disctinct types of customers in the Reseller market and 2 types of plans to accommodate them. The first customer is someone who owns multiple sites but doesn’t want a lot of separate hosting plans to keep up with. The second customer is the owner of a hosting company.

In the first case the customer is really looking for a large shared hosting plan that allows multiple domains. More frequently in the industry you see the term “Multi-Domain account” to refer to these plans. These customers can be webmasters with a network of websites, web designers, or a company that wants separate websites for their different brands. Most people doing business on the internet have more then 1 website. Hosting companies have recently taken notice to this and started offering “multiple domain” accounts. Before customers were left with the choice of a full blown Reseller plan, dedicated server, or multiple hosting accounts.

These accounts can also be less inexpensive then traditional Reseller plans because they do not need to offer all of the services such as Private label branding. They are essentially shared hosting accounts that allow for several domains.

The second customer is really looking for a turnkey business, a franchise of the parent hosting company if you will. These customers are hosting companies who do not want to carry the overhead of a datacenter or series of managed servers. Using a Reseller Hosting plan allows a hosting company to have a complete professional hosting company without all of the traditional startup costs. Like anything, there are trade-offs versus a dedicated server, but for a small hosting company or startup it is an ideal solution. It allows them to focus on growing a customer base and not infrastructure issues.

These hosting plans are more expensive then shared and multi-domain hosting plans but offer extra services. They usually come with private label branding, private nameservers, marketing discounts, and forum boards with other resellers of the company.

As you can see from this discussion the hosting industry has many customers with different needs. The Reseller and Shared hosting markets are converging the meet the demands of the customer with multiple websites.