Shared Hosting vs Reseller from an eCommerce Perspective

Every eCommerce website has special web hosting needs, especially those that are designed to sell thousands of products. With so many factors to consider it can be difficult to decide which web hosting environment would best suit your eCommerce site. Creating product catalogs, integrating custom shopping carts, and implementing payment processing features on your site all require intensive server resources and a special kind of control panel. Without the right hosting plan you could find yourself making unnecessary upgrades in the future, only after experiencing months of frustration caused by site down time and slow loading pages. So which is better for eCommerce hosting – shared or reseller?

Pricing

Reseller hosting is significantly more expensive than shared hosting because you have so much more control and power at your disposal. In a shared hosting account your site is sharing a web server with hundreds of other sites. If your sole intention is to run eCommerce site then this could become a problem rather quickly, especially if you are sharing a server with hundreds of other demanding eCommerce sites. Shared hosting starts at around $5 per month whereas the cheapest reseller hosting plan costs about $15 per month. Reseller gives you the power to split your server resources into packages and sell them for a profit, so ultimately you may end up paying less for reseller hosting.

Business Benefits

Before embarking on any business endeavor it is best to weigh all of the pros and cons. Shared hosting has a lot of cons, with the only pros being it’s affordability. Reseller hosting on the other hand has many pros that can be applied to various business models. For example, if you are running an eCommerce site that also markets online services, you could easily resell a portion of the same server that is used to host your site! This essentially allow you to have free web hosting for your site, since the profit you would be making from reselling would allow the hosting to pay for itself. This kind of control and flexibility is perhaps the most appealing aspect of reseller hosting.

Security and Reliability

Since shared web hosting involves sharing a web server with hundreds of other web sites, it can become unsafe at times when one of these websites is attacked. This is because the attack will usually cripple the entire server, thus shutting down completely unrelated websites, like yours! When this happens your site could be inaccessible for hours, causing you to lose all sales that could have been generated from your eCommerce site during that period. Alternatively, reseller hosting plans are not as fragile, and are generally considered to be more reliable and secure.

Recommendations

Ultimately, your decision should be made based upon the needs of your eCommerce site. If you are selling several digital products then shared hosting may suffice. However, if you plan on setting up a product catalog complete with thousands of product descriptions and images, then you will need the server power to back that up. With reseller hosting you’ll not only have a better server, but you’ll also have full control over the server resources. With the ability to sell hosting plans, you can easily make enough profit for the hosting plan to pay for itself.

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