Reseller or VPS, Which To Choose?
by: Sohaib Thiab
With the emergence of VPS's and with it currently being widely offered by a number of web hosts. sometime at low prices, the question that comes to our minds would be, what should I choose? a VPS or a normal reseller plan, to help you with the decision we will mention the pros and cons for both sides, which would help you better understand both of them and thus help you make the most suitable choice for your current needs.
We will start with the pros and cons of a VPS, a Virtual Private Server is basically like a reseller plan in terms of disk space and bandwidth, you would usually find reseller plans come with more disk space and bandwidth, but a VPS has allot more benefits over a reseller, the 1st one would be Root access, with a VPS you have root access which is not available with almost all reseller plans, some would say and why would I need root access, in some cases you could be right, if your looking only to resell shared hosting plans you probably wouldn't need root access, but if your looking to install some custom software, learn some system administration on a remote machine, a VPS would be the perfect solution for that instead of investing in a dedicated server which would cost allot more than a VPS. A VPS also can be loaded with a number of operating systems depending on what the provider supports, for example of you were to choose a VPS on a linux platform you would be able to offer linux web hosting plans, which can also be measured on the windows platform.
The 2nd and most important advantage for a VPS is the privacy and isolation you have from other clients on the server, in a shared reseller environment, your account and your hosted accounts could be damaged because of someone else's fault on the server, for example if another reseller on the same server your placed has a client running a loopy script which would eventually crash the server, your account will suffer from downtime because of that, which wouldn't happen with a VPS environment, if a VPS where to crash on the server your VPS is placed on your VPS wouldn't be effected at all.
The 3rd advantage would be the dedicated resources each VPS usually comes with, each VPS usually comes with a minimum guaranteed CPU and memory usage for your VPS, which means no one can abuse the server resources or manipulate it for his account, in the worst case you would have your guaranteed CPU and memory to use.
VPS would be the best choice between a reseller plan and a dedicated server, a VPS would give you more reliability and room to expand with your web hosting business. At PremiusHosting, although we do offer a wide range of Affordable windows web hosting plans, but we currently don't offer windows reseller plans, which is not the case with a VPS which can be loaded with any operating system you want as long as we support it (currently either Windows server 2003 or fedora core 1)
Reseller Plans also have some advantages over a VPS, with a reseller plan you usually don't have to worry about the server security, keeping your software up to date and the general management of the server which is usually taken care of from your provider.
My Advice would be, if your not experienced with running a server, just starting out or you just don't have time to take care of a VPS, I would recommend a reseller plan, otherwise a VPS would be a smarter choice.
About The Author
Sohaib Thiab
Founder and CEO of PremiusHosting Technologies as well a number of internet service providers and communities.
www.Premiushosting.com[email protected]
