Compare the Best Reseller Hosting of 2025
Best Reseller Hosting Providers of 2025
Methodology
Our scoring methodology for our provider lists includes a deep dive into features, benefits, costs and feedback from real-life users like you. Dozens of datapoints are collected, vetted and scored to narrow down our providers before hands-on testing finalizes our list.
Decision Factor | Scoring Weight | Description |
---|---|---|
Pricing | 23% | Especially when reselling a product, you need a decent margin while still staying competitive. We also considered the cost of entry burden that higher initial plan costs can create for small agencies just getting started. |
Core features | 24% | The core features considered included the basics for a functioning reseller business and the level of flexibility offered. A few of the items we considered were the number of databases, cPanel licenses, automatic WordPress updates, uptime guarantees and whether customer billing software was included or cost extra. |
Extra functions | 22% | Sometimes the extras are what make a product worth using and increase profits for resellers. A few of the features we considered here include account migrations, SSL certificates, CDNs, email accounts and security features. |
Service and support | 3% | Especially when dealing with keeping your own clients happy, customer service and technical support are vital. We looked at response times, helpfulness and quality of responses to common problems. |
Consumer Sentiment Index | 28% | Even with hands-on testing, we want to know what real-world daily customers think. What problems occur over time? How has the hosting provider saved the reseller’s bacon in a difficult situation? How is server response speed and stability over years of use? Our proprietary algorithm compiles and analyzes thousands of reviews to get a full picture of user experience. |
How Does Reseller Hosting Work?
Reseller hosting means buying hosting from a web hosting provider and reselling it to your end clients with the help of tools to create custom packages and pricing for your end clients. Web design agencies and freelancers often do this as an added service and revenue stream to retain customers longer than the initial website build.
Other uses include business owners creating their own web hosting company without needing to invest in server infrastructure, groups such as merchants’ associations splitting hosting costs while keeping a bit more control over their hosting and individuals who need more flexibility in hosting and managing multiple websites than even the best web hosting companies provide for individual plans.
There are three main models of how reseller hosting works, although some hosts mix and match things a bit.
Reseller Hosting Packages
Under this model, the web host offers specific reseller packages, usually with extra server resources and features to handle multiple end customers under each plan. Billing and management software, white labeling for client-side access, user controls, multiple licenses for control panels and multiple email accounts are common in this type of program.
Hosting Packages at Cost With Extra Features
Some web hosts offer the option of buying reseller access from the host to allow you to resell some (or all) of the host’s plans. Basically, you are paying a fee for extra permissions outside of the standard service level agreement (SLA) or terms of service (TOS). Under this plan, hosting providers may (or may not) include white label options, billing and management software, like WHMCS and end-user technical support.
While this type of reseller hosting usually gives a lot of flexibility in types of hosting you offer to your customers, it doesn’t offer discounts on the hosting, and each plan sold will usually be one user per plan, so your plans will be more expensive than plans through other hosts most of the time after you add a markup.
Hosting Reseller Partner Programs
Partner programs are the most exclusive type of reseller hosting. Most partner programs from web hosting providers require some verification of your identity and the type of business you run before acceptance. On the plus side, partner programs often include extras like marketing help and enhanced support in addition to white labeling and features included with other reseller program types.
How To Choose the Best Reseller Hosting Provider
If you don’t have the budget or technical skills for dedicated bare metal server hosting that you can portion out and sell for shared hosting or VPS plans on your own, you can get started with reseller hosting plans. Picking the right reseller hosting provider for your business depends on your needs and the customers you will host websites for. For example, do your customers need VPS hosting or will shared hosting do? Likewise, do you need included cPanel and WHMCS licensing, or will you purchase that separately?
Essential Reseller Hosting Features
Like stand-alone web hosting packages, reseller hosting packages have a wide variety of features, server resources, performance and tools available. While you’ll most likely never find two identical reseller hosting plans to compare apples to apples, knowing what features to look for can help you see where corners are cut and where higher pricing is justified.
- White-label branding. A core part of reseller hosting is being able to use your own branding rather than the reseller hosting provider’s branding. This usually means your branding on the dashboard that your client sees, and all billing documents as well.
- Access to discounts. Some hosts offer partner plans to access reseller discounts on most or all of their normal plans, while others offer specific reseller plans without the need to apply for a partnership program. Which works best for you depends on the type of plans and size of the discount you need.
- Plan creation and management. You’ll need a way to create and price hosting packages for your clients. A good reseller includes tools on the dashboard to manage the reselling part of the web hosting.
- Payment gateways. A crucial part of being able to resell hosting plans is being able to get paid. Look for a reseller hosting provider that supports several of the best payment gateways to increase your potential customer base.
- Hosting type. Do you want to offer shared hosting, VPS, cloud hosting or something in between? The type of hosting you prefer to sell plays a large part in provider selection, as not all providers offer all hosting types for reseller programs.
- Server resources and performance. Server resources, such as memory and storage, are important because they affect how much you can resell. Speed and performance are also vital. Slow server response times and frequent downtime will frustrate your customers and risk them leaving your new reseller business.
- Plan limits. Beyond resource limits, the reseller plan you buy will often include a limited number of control panel (such as cPanel) licenses or a cap on the number of plans you can create within each reseller plan, regardless of resources available.
- Security. Just like when choosing your own hosting, website and server security is vital for reseller hosting. Firewalls, DDoS protections, DNSSEC-compatible nameservers, user permission controls, 2FA and automatic backups are all hosting security features to look for.
- End-client technical support. While sometimes touted as a passive income stream for website designers, reseller hosting is anything but passive. With self-managed plans, you have all the behind-the-scenes maintenance to handle and technical support to provide for your client. Even with managed plans, technical support is often only provided to you, and not directly to your end client. If you don’t have the time or patience for that, using a reseller hosting provider with strong managed plans and technical support for your end-users is a huge time-saver.
20i, ScalaHosting and InMotion have a nice set of core features.
Value
Value is more than pricing, but with reseller hosting, pricing is trickier to calculate than many other hosting plans. The reason is that you need to consider how many users you can resell to on each plan.
While some reseller providers offer cheap plans of $2 monthly, these often only have one end user (and cPanel license) per plan. In comparison, a $15 monthly plan from a different provider may have a couple of dozen cPlan licenses/user limits. In that case, your cost per end user (all other features being equal) would be $2 with the first provider but only a few cents on the more expensive plan.
Likewise, cheaper plans may not include WHMCS or other customer billing software licensing and may have fewer hosting plan types to offer your end clients.
Even once you have compared costs as much as possible, you need to consider technical support and ease of use. The value of your reseller hosting is far less if you spend more time fighting with the interface than working. Likewise, how fast does support respond, and do they actually fix things or does it take days of back and forth to reach a resolution? Be sure to look at overall costs and values rather than just grabbing the cheapest plan available.
20i, ScalaHosting and InMotion Hosting have a nice mix of price to features.
Control Panel Options
While cPanel is widely considered the industry standard, it isn’t always the most user-friendly and branding controls can be limited without additional customer management software. Pricing is a regular complaint for cPanel as well.
However, while custom control panels like HostShop and SPanel often offer more functionality and are more user-friendly, it can make it tricky to migrate away from the host should anything go wrong later on.
Another consideration when choosing between cPanel and a proprietary control panel is that not all custom control panels are well-fleshed out. For example, SiteGround’s Site Tools are pretty limited compared to most other custom control panels.
NameCrane, ScalaHosting and 20i offer multiple control panel choices.
Customer Management and Billing Software
There’s a pretty big split in how reseller hosting providers handle customer management and billing software. While most include some type of software, there’s recently been a push to leave it up to the customer as to which software they use. Some of that is that the increased variety of software available makes it difficult for providers to guess which one you’ll prefer. Another part of it is to make pricing appear lower, as providers aren’t prepaying for software licensing.
However, the end result is that you must be cautious when comparing pricing. Website hosting costs are affected by the features provided. Provider A may offer a package for $25 per month, while Provider B charges $40 per month. However, Provider B’s package may include customer management and billing software that Provider A doesn’t, which helps offset much of the price difference. Whether you prefer your customer management and billing software bundled or not, be sure to factor in those costs as needed when comparing reseller hosting providers.
If you choose a provider that offers customer management and billing software, be sure it is a package you like. WMHCS, Clientexec, SuiteDash, Blesta, and MyResellerGenie are all popular billing and customer management options. However, not all of them are regularly offered by reseller hosting providers, so you may need to license a package regardless of what your host offers separately.
20i, InMotion Hosting, NameCrane and RackNerd all include a client billing and management software package.
Uptime Guarantees and Past Performance
Every website can go down at any time. It’s just a fact of life for web hosting. However, thanks to cloud computing, power backups and managed servers (even if your plan itself isn’t managed), downtime is minimal in most cases.
Still, the difference between 99.9% uptime and 99.99% uptime is nearly 8 hours over the course of a year, with 99.99% being 52 minutes and 36 seconds of downtime and 99.9% being 8 hours, 45 minutes and 57 seconds.
Downtime costs far more than just lost sales during that downtime. David Flower, president and CEO of Volt Active Data, told Forbes that data loss, damage to your reputation, customer churn and internal employee productivity are all consequences of downtime.
Past performance is important to see how often a company lives up to great uptime. However, while there has been a movement away from uptime guarantees over the last few years as more and more companies reach an average 99.99% benchmark for performance, I always like to look for a guarantee.
While the payout for not making a guarantee is usually nothing more than a month’s service credit, I think it speaks to the company’s willingness to put its money where its mouth is. If a guarantee is not provided, it may indicate that the company has internal concerns about its future performance.
InMotion Hosting, SetraHost and HostWinds all have good uptime guarantees, and RackNerd guarantees 100% power.
Which Reseller Hosting Is Best for Your Business?
Much of what makes the best reseller hosting provider for your business depends on your clients. For example, if your agency is creating websites for e-commerce or for larger businesses, you’ll need more power and features than for small businesses with simple, low-traffic static websites.
For example:
- Need easy white-label hosting? Consider SertaHost, 20i or ScalaHosting.
- Need high bandwidth and storage limits? Take a look at 20i, InMotion Hosting and Hostwinds.
- Need bargain pricing for simple websites? Consider Hostwinds, NameCrane and SertaHost.
Are Big Brands the Best Reseller Hosting?
Some of the giants in hosting, such as GoDaddy and Bluehost, have the shakiest reputations or no longer offer reseller hosting. Others, like Liquid Web, were once superstars for providing white-labeled end-user technical support but took a reputation and service hit in mergers. Similarly, A2 Hosting rebranded as hosting.com and changed most of its hosting plan offerings.
Then there are guilt-by-association hosting companies, such as HostGator, where the reputation and policies of its parent company, Newfold Digital, are carried over to affect the individual hosting provider. The bottom line is that name recognition doesn’t guarantee great reseller hosting.
While performance and support experiences can vary widely within a single host depending on your hosting type and plan, most of the big brands in hosting still tend to stay relatively true to form. So, whether you have bargain basement shared hosting or more advanced plans such as dedicated hosting, VPS, cloud and reseller hosting, it’s often still the same customer service and technical support teams backing up those plans.
Another point to consider is expertise. While many of the big names also offer domain registration and other extra services, how competent are they in each category? For example, even though it’s an extra step in connecting a domain, many times it’s better to use one of the best domain registrars than to just put everything in one basket.
If you are considering a big-name reseller hosting provider solely because of its name, take a close look at what’s under the hood before making a decision. Otherwise, you might wind up with all marketing flash and no substance in the hosting itself or the support services.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is reseller hosting?
Reseller hosting means buying hosting (usually in bulk) from a web hosting provider and reselling it to an end user. It’s a lot like buying products at wholesale pricing and selling it for retail pricing. Reseller hosting sometimes offers domain reselling as well.
How is reseller hosting priced?
Reseller hosting has two main pricing schemes. The simplest is a set of reseller hosting plans where you pick a plan and pay the stated price. The other is to join a partner or reseller program with a web hosting provider and get a discount on any plan you buy to resell. Joining a partner program usually requires verification of your business but may come with additional perks compared to direct plan purchases.
Is reseller hosting the same as affiliate programs?
No, reselling hosting is like buying hosting wholesale and selling it retail. An affiliate program gives you a small commission anytime someone buys a hosting plan based on your recommendation. Affiliate programs usually include specific advertising rules and guidelines as to how you can advertise the services and what is required for you to get credit for a sale.
Is reselling web hosting worth it?
Reseller hosting is absolutely worth it in many cases. While most of the time it isn’t a large profit margin, it can provide a continuing revenue stream and help differentiate you from other web design agencies.
How do I provide technical support for my hosting clients?
With reseller hosting, technical support for your end clients often falls on you. However, there are a few reseller providers that will talk directly to your end client. If you must provide the support, you can still contact technical support with questions if you don’t know the answer yourself and then act on the advice. Sometimes, technical support may need to resolve issues on their end as well.