5 Best Reseller Hosting Providers: Time To Rethink?
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You can buy web hosting for almost anything – from personal WordPress blogs, small- and medium-sized business storefronts, all the way up to sites for enterprises. You can even buy enough server power to run your own web hosting service.
This is known as reseller hosting. It’s not something all hosting providers offer – and even when you find one that does, how do you know it’s any good?
To answer this question, we’ve put all of the major providers offering reseller hosting through our extensive research process. We’ve been writing about getting online for many years now, and we’ve been collecting insights from our users about what’s important to them. This article is the product of those two processes: extensive research, and user feedback.
So we can now say with complete confidence that these are the five best reseller hosting providers on the market today. By the end of this article, you’ll in turn be completely confident about which one is best for you.
But first, what is reseller hosting?
Reseller hosting allows you to sell hosting to others, so you can actually start your own web hosting company this way! You pay for a hosting plan, and then sell that hosting on to somebody else who needs it. Best for those who’ll be managing 10 sites or more, reseller hosting is often used by web designers or businesses who need to provide hosting to clients.
According to our extensive research, these are the five best reseller hosts:
5 Best Reseller Hosting Services
- InMotion – Best value for money
- HostGator – Best for features
- GreenGeeks – Best for green hosting
- A2 Hosting – Best for support
- HostPapa – Best for reseller beginners
The best reseller hosting providers are InMotion, HostGator, GreenGeeks, A2 Hosting and HostPapa, based on factors such as uptime, features, help and support, pricing, and more:
All of the providers we’ve featured:
- Use a cPanel dashboard – this is the industry standard (making it easy to get to grips with, and transfer to another provider if need be)
- Let you create a branded client panel – so customers see your logo and branding, not your provider’s
- Give you unlimited domains – so you can set up your clients with their own domain, at no extra cost
But each comes with its own strengths and weaknesses, which we’ll cover in detail below.
A quick word on pricing
If we’ve learnt one thing in our (many) years of analysing hosting providers, it’s that their prices change faster than you can say ‘Plans start from…’. They can also be a little sneaky, offering low introductory prices (with higher renewal costs), and discounts for the longer you sign up. We’ve done our best to ensure that these prices are both accurate and a direct comparison, but it’s always worth double checking directly on the provider’s pricing page (which we’ll link to from the prices).
InMotion
Best value for money
| Pricing | $29.99 - $94.99 per month |
|---|---|
| Client accounts | 25 – Unlimited, depending on the plan |
| Disk space | 80GB – 260GB |
| Bandwidth | 800GB – 6TB |
| Up-time performance | 99.7% |
| Free backups | Yes |
| Money-back guarantee | Offered for 90 days |
| Our score | 4.6/5 |
What’s good about InMotion’s reseller hosting?
When we conducted our own survey of people looking for a hosting provider, 55% said that price was the most important factor in their decision – so chances are, the same will be true for the clients coming to you for their hosting plans.
That’s a big reason why InMotion came out on top – it doesn’t offer the cheapest plan, but it does offer the best value for money, with the highest disk space and very high bandwidth levels. This value will translate into cheaper, more appealing plans for your customers.
InMotion also offers a free domain reseller account with all reseller hosting plans, so you’ve got an extra income option there should you need it. It has the highest number of plans, making it the most scalable option – you can easily start out on the cheapest plan, and upgrade easily as you need to.
InMotion offers really strong customer support with 24/7 live chat and phone support, alongside an email and ticketing system. The value of quality help and support shouldn’t be overlooked – as a hosting reseller, if you have a problem with your account, chances are all your clients will have a problem with theirs, and you’ll want to get someone on the case ASAP. InMotion also offers the longest money-back guarantee period at 90 days, giving you an easy ‘out’ if you don’t get on with anything.
What could be improved?
While InMotion does offer great value (take another look at the disk space and bandwidth on offer), it does offer relatively few client accounts on its cheaper plans. Its entry-level plan, the RS000S, costs $29.99/month and gives you up to 25 client accounts. Compare that to HostGator offering unlimited client accounts for $5/month less, and you can see this is a bit of a compromise.
InMotion’s uptime guarantee also isn’t the highest on this list, coming in second behind HostGator. True, the projected downtime only amounts to a number of hours – but once again, apply this to all your clients, and you can start to see the value of the extra 0.01% uptime.
For a more detailed rundown of HostGator, check out our in-depth InMotion Hosting Review to find out where it really excels.
HostGator
Best for features
| Pricing | $24.95 - $99.99 per month |
|---|---|
| Client accounts | Unlimited |
| Disk space | 60GB – 250GB |
| Bandwidth | 600GB – 2500GB |
| Up-time performance | 99.98% |
| Free backups | Nope, costs extra |
| Money-back guarantee | Offered for 45 days |
| Our score | 4.1/5 |
What’s good about HostGator’s reseller hosting?
HostGator has the best uptime guarantee of any reseller hosting provider on this list. Again, that extra 0.01% might not seem like a lot, but even an hour of downtime for your clients will cause you a lot of stress, so this is a huge pro.
HostGator also offers unlimited client accounts, although of course you’re ultimately capped by the disk space and bandwidth limits. That said, you’ll get huge value out of a HostGator account if you’re building lots of small, largely static sites – or are selling accounts to those who are. With a lot of low-demanding websites, those resources can go a long way.
Like InMotion, HostGator offers a free domain reseller account with each reseller hosting plan – a nice, natural addition to your hosting income. HostGator also has strong customer support, with help on offer around the clock over phone or live chat.
HostGator is one of the greenest hosting providers, offsetting its carbon emissions by 130%.
What could be improved?
HostGator knocks it out of the park when it comes to features and uptime, but it’s still down in second place. What gives?
Well, the main reason is its less-than-simple backup policy. Three out of five providers on this list offer free backups, but with HostGator it’s not so straightforward; it creates ‘weekly backups for accounts that are under 20 GB and 100,000 inodes’, or can do so at your request, for $25 a time. It’s not the end of the world, but could potentially add up quite quickly.
Check out our HostGator Review to find out more about its performance, features, pricing and more
GreenGeeks
Best for green hosting
| Pricing | $29.95 - $59.95 per month |
|---|---|
| Client accounts | Up to 80 |
| Disk space | 60GB – 160GB |
| Bandwidth | 600GB – 1,600GB |
| Up-time performance | 99.98% |
| Free backups | 1 per month ($25 each for additional backups) $5 per manual cPanel backup request |
| Money-back guarantee | 30 days |
| Our score | 3.5/5 |
What’s good about GreenGeek’s reseller hosting?
Passionate about helping the environment? Then you’ll love GreenGeeks. It offers a 300% green energy matching in which it will match 100% of your usage, plus another 200%, with renewable energy. This could be your unique selling point when looking to sell your web hosting space.
Its uptime guarantee of 99.98% is joint first place with HostGator in our research, plus it offers strong help and support options with 24/7 live chat available.
Also, with prices ranging from $29.95/month to just $59.95/month, GreenGeeks is good value for money.
What could be improved?
Need ample bandwidth? Then GreenGeeks might not be the right choice for you. From our research, we were disappointed with its bandwidth offerings of just 600GB, 800GB, and 1,600GB.
Considering Inmotion and HostGator offer up to 6TB and 2,500GB bandwidth on their highest plans, respectively, you can see how much GreenGeeks falls short in this department.
Lastly, GreenGeeks does offer one free backup per month, but many other hosting providers offer unlimited free backups every month.
A2 Hosting
Best for support
| Pricing | $19.99 - $61.99 per month |
|---|---|
| Client accounts | 40-100 |
| Disk space | 30GB – 200GB |
| Bandwidth | 400 GB – 2000 GB |
| Up-time performance | 99.95% |
| Free backups | Yes |
| Money-back guarantee | Offered for 30 days |
| Our score | 3.3/5 |
What’s good about A2 Hosting’s reseller hosting?
A2 Hosing’s reseller packages are affordable, with prices starting around the $19.99 mark.
There’s excellent help and support on offer across phone, live chat and email, with 24/7 options. We’ve tested A2 Hosting’s live chat and can confirm it is both swift and helpful – exactly what you need from your web host.
What could be improved?
A2 Hosting also has the joint worst uptime guarantee, so will – at least in theory – give you the most downtime of any provider we’ve featured here (although keep in mind that this is just a ‘worse case scenario’).
A2 Hosting is also the least scalable provider on this list, with the lowest bandwidth and disk space capacity. If you have aspirations of really growing your business, whether you’re a designer or a hosting reseller, you’ll find there’s a cap on what you can achieve compared to with other providers.
You can read a lot more about A2 Hosting, including its performance and reliability, features and customer support, by checking out our A2 Hosting Review.
HostPapa
Best for small-scale reseller hosting
| Pricing | $29.99 - $119.99 per month |
|---|---|
| Client accounts | 20-60 |
| Disk space | 50GB – 250GB |
| Bandwidth | 500 GB – 2.5 TB |
| Up-time performance | 99.95% |
| Free backups | For a limited number of domains |
| Money-back guarantee | Offered for 30 days |
| Our score | 3.2/5 |
What’s good about HostPapa’s reseller hosting?
HostPapa is featured on this list because our research found it to be the fifth best reseller hosting provider. While it does okay when compared to the other four providers, there’s not really a lot it does better – and a fair bit it does worse.
What could be improved?
First, it has the joint worst uptime score (tied with A2 Hosting). We’ve already talked enough about why you should really crunch uptime numbers when looking for a reseller account, so we won’t go into too much detail on that again.
HostPapa doesn’t offer 24/7 support either by phone, or live chat. This is a huge blow in our eyes; in our experience, hosting problems don’t conveniently fit into office hours – that’s why we think there’s real value in round-the-clock support.
The top four providers on this list also offer billing software with their plans, so you can easily charge clients through your own account. While HostPapa offers this with its three most expensive plans (Gold, Platinum and Titanium), it doesn’t come included with the cheaper two – a real blow to your logistics if you are planning to sell the hosting on, and not just hand it out to clients.
And finally, HostPapa only offers free backups to a certain number of domain names, which singles it out from the three out of five providers which offer free backups across the board, as standard.
Go check out our full HostPapa Review to find out more.
5 Best Reseller Hosting Providers: Conclusion
And that’s a wrap! Once again, the 5 best reseller hosting providers, according to our research, are:
- InMotion – Best value for money
- HostGator – Best for features
- GreenGeeks – Best for green hosting
- A2 Hosting – Best for support
- HostPapa – Best for reseller beginners
Whether you’re a web designer looking to set up a few client accounts, or a hosting reseller looking to sell hundreds, we hope you’ve found a provider that will work for you. And remember, with all of them offering a money-back guarantee, you’ve got nothing to lose by giving one a go.
If you want to go with our recommendation, you don’t need to look further than HostGator. Overall it’s our top rated hosting company, as well as top rated for reseller hosting.
FAQs
Further Information
That’s it for our look at the 5 best reseller hosting services. For more information about hosting providers, check out our reviews and hosting comparisons:
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