There are three kinds of Web Hosting. Shared Web Hosting, Dedicated Web Hosting and Reseller Web Hosting.

Shared Web Hosting is the most common type of Web Hosting. In this kind of hosting, you create a web hosting account with a registrar for a monthly or yearly fee with a set amount of web space, bandwidth, functionality, etc. The web hosting company 'hosts' your website on their server. This kind of hosting is best suited for small businesses or individuals.

Dedicated Hosting is another type of hosting. It is best suited for sites that are large and attract extremely heavy traffic. Your website is the only one that is hosted on the server in Dedicated Hosting. The bandwidth and web space is not shared with others in this kind of hosting.

Almost everybody needs a website today. Be it an individual setting up a business or a company. When you start a web hosting company, you may not have enough capital to invest in the company or the infrastructure to meet the demands of running a web hosting company. It is important to concentrate on the marketing of your hosting company to get it noticed than to get into the hassle of getting your company to make more business. This is where Reseller Web Hosting comes into play.

If you are doing Reseller Web Hosting, you can buy a bulk hosting plan from an established web hosting company. What happens here is that a large amount of bandwidth and web space is allotted to you. You can then divide this into smaller bits and "resell" them to other customers. How this helps is that you build a partnership with an established web hosting company, avoid the hassles of getting your company good business from the start and concentrate more on marketing your company and getting it noticed.

In reseller web hosting, the web server is owned and managed by the primary host or the established web hosting company. However, the reseller can claim the server as their own but they will have very little access to it.

A typical reseller hosting account has the following characteristics:

The reseller is like the agent of a primary hosting company. It may sometimes also use the primary hosting company's brand name while marketing web hosting packages. A reseller will sometimes advertise the hosting packages as a part of the primary hosting company. In a situation like this, the customers are redirected to the primary hosting company for all the technical support and other needs while the reseller just limits himself to the marketing service. Sometimes the reseller can rebrand the package in his own name and sell it to the customers.

The resellers may either rebrand the service and sell it as their own or act as a representative of the parent company depending on their arrangement with the parent company.

Resellers purchase web hosting space and bandwidth in bulk from the primary hosting company and then divide it into smaller packages depending on the need of their customers.

If you want to start a Reseller Hosting business, you need to follow certain steps.

1. Find a reliable primary hosting company that offers good reseller packages.

2. Come up with a good marketing plan to take your packages to your customers. Decide if you want to repackage the service in your name or want to act like a representative of the parent company. Make sure that your partner company is open to both kinds of arrangement.

3. Be careful to have enough control over the control panel as a reseller so that you can invoice your customer.

4. Try and get a new angle to the whole thing and make it different from other web hosting companies so that your customers come to you for their web hosting services and not go to other companies. This could be your pricing, the flexibility of packages you offer or something similar.

5. Market your service well. Promote your service online and make sure all your sites are well optimized so that there is good traffic coming to your site.