24-hour Support

As a reseller, 24-hour support may prove invaluable. You will have numerous clients and thus proportionally more problems than if you were running just your own website. If your hosting provider does not have round-the-clock tech support, you may be caught waiting until Monday morning to fix a problem with a client's website, while the client will expect the problem fixed immediately.

Aliased Nameservers

Since the public perception is that dealing with resellers is less desirable than dealing directly with a primary hosting provider, aliasing your nameserver allows you to keep your primary hosting provider transparent. By running "whois" queries on your domain name, a client can often detect that you are reselling services. Therefore, many hosting companies provide to resellers the option of aliased nameservers. Then when a client runs a whois query on a reseller's domain name, the nameserver displayed is "ns.reseller.com" rather than "ns.reseller's_providers.com".

Dedicated Server Options

Dedicated servers are servers that your hosting provider has reserved only for you and the accounts you have resold; none of the hosting provider's other accounts reside on the machine. Therefore, your sites will not have to share bandwidth or CPU power with other sites. Dedicated servers also allow you to have complete control over the configuration and administration of the server. If you plan to have many clients or particularily high bandwidth sites, dedicated servers will probably become necessary. You can visit the Dedicated Server Page to view premiere companies offering dedicated server programs.

Discounts for Nonprofits

If your own organization or your potential clients are nonprofit, you may be able to get a discount from some hosting providers.

Free Domain Registration for Reseller's Customers

This feature signifies whether or not the hosting provider will handle the domain name registration procedure for free. This does not mean that there will be no cost for domain name registration; the InterNIC fees will apply regardless.

Mail Server

Like aliasing nameservers, having an aliased mail server legitamizes your company. Your client will need to know the mail server to send email. If you provide them with a mail server that is not of your domain, your client will realize that you are reselling someone else's services.

Money-back Guarantee

Many companies offer 30 day or even 90 day money-back guarantees.

Non-virtual domain Account Available

You may find that some clients are not interested in investing in their own domain name and are content with URLs of the form http://www.yourdomain.com/yourclient or http://www.yourdomain.com/~yourclient. Such URLs are dubbed "non-virtual." If you see your clients only prefering URLs of the form http://www.yourclient.com, this feature is not important.

Prewritten documentation for use by Reseller

Some hosting providers offer a manual describing how to use their services or documentation about what services they offer. They allow resellers to display the documentation on their websites and distribute it to their clients. This prewritten documentation keeps the reseller from having to write their own documentation.

Support Adult Sites

If you plan to resell services to clients interested in setting up a site with adult content, you need to be sure that your provider will allow it.

Support International Clients

Reselling internationally is a particularly lucrative opportunity because most large-scale hosting companies are based in North America. Therefore, the competition elsewhere is far less. If you are potentially going to have international clients, it will be important that your provider allow for an international clientele.

Support International Domains

If you are an international reseller, you will want to be able to provide domain names of various countries (*.uk, *.ca, *.jp, etc.).

Technical Support Provided for Reseller's Customers

Some hosting providers offer direct technical support to resellers' clients and may even operate under the pretense of being from your company. This is a rarity, though, and many hosting providers assume that you will want to handle your own technical support.

Third-level Domains

Third-level domains would allow you to sell URLs of the format http://yourclient.yourdomain.com. Often this might be preferrable to smaller clients that don't wish pay InterNIC fees for a domain name, yet don't want a long URL of the format http://www.yourdomain.com/yourclient or http://www.yourdomain.com/~yourclient.

Toll-free Support

Toll-free tech support is appealing for obvious reasons. Do you want to pay the long-distance company everytime you have a technical question for your hosting provider?

Unix Hosting

The web server runs on a UNIX-based platform.

Virtual IP Capability

Some hosting providers allow resellers to have domain names that point to subdirectories of the reseller's account, such that http://www.yourclient.com serves files stored in http://www.yourdomain.com/yourclient. The benefit of this kind of account is that it does not require that the reseller purchase another account to resell, and consequently can be set up cheaply. On the other hand, the reseller is essentially sharing the account with the client. All storage and bandwidth, for example, must be shared with the client.

Web-based Reseller Account Administration

Many hosting providers offer web-based control panels, but not all offer control panels specifically geared towards their resellers. Such a control panel might allow, for example, adding of new resold accounts, adding or removing options in existing accounts, current billing and balance information, etc.

Windows NT Hosting

The web server runs on WindowsNT.