Reseller web hosting is a system whereby a company buys bulk hosting at a wholesale price and then subdivides it and sells it at a markup. The reseller buys the hosting from a large data center that operates the servers. Depending on the type of reseller account, the reseller may offer the technical support and billing, or it may be performed seamlessly by the data center.

Resellers may be very large companies hosting thousands of sites. They are responsible for promoting their hosting plans and supporting and billing their customers. They in turn, are supported by the original reseller. Some resellers are just small web design companies that offer hosting for their customers at a small profit. Because the reseller has fewer customers to deal with than the bulk hosting seller, they can usually offer far better service and technical support.

Why become a reseller? It is far cheaper to buy a reselling package than it is to invest in a data center and your own servers and personnel. Many large web hosting companies have started off as resellers and eventually bought their own data centers. Reselling can be a profitable enterprise.

For example, you can purchase reseller hosting plan offered by an established Hosting Provider for $99.95 per month. It comes with 20GB of disk space and 200GB of total bandwidth. You can resell as many accounts as you want. If you split this into 40 accounts each with 500MB of disk space and 5GB of bandwidth at $10 per account you would net (40 x $10 - $99.95) $300.05 per month before your expenses.

If you hosted just 500 accounts you would net $45,000 a year before operating costs. When you consider that some of the largest hosts on the web are each hosting millions of sites, 500 does not seem like an awful lot. This is one reason why many companies are turning to reselling as a viable source of revenue.

Reselling website hosting is a business opportunity that requires very little startup capital and is very scalable. Starting your own hosting company through reselling can be accomplished for less than $50/month. This includes the cost of a website template, domain name, a reseller hosting account and other needed software such as a billing system and hosting control panel. If you are a tech-minded individual with an entrepreneurial spirit, reseller hosting could be the opportunity for you.

To get started, research as many web hosting companies and reseller hosting plans as you can. Don't limit your criteria to simple statistics such as website storage, bandwidth, and price offered with each plan. See what other people have to say about the reliability and support from each company. Visit some popular hosting directories, blogs, and web hosting forums.