If you’re a webmaster who manages multiple websites, you already know the significant monthly financial commitment that is required to maintain multiple personal web hosting accounts. Even if you have bottom of the barrel pricing for each account; say $2.95 per month, the pricing gets ridiculous when you have over 15 active websites. A reseller hosting account can help a flourishing webmaster of any size keep hosting fees to a minimum while having the freedom to add new websites without incurring additional costs.

Reseller hosting accounts differ from personal web hosting accounts, VPS hosting accounts and also dedicated hosting accounts. We’ll explore each briefly here and note the differences.

A personal hosting plan typically allows you to maintain one website with access to one control panel to manage the particular website. These types of hosting plans are usually well suited for individuals who only plan on working with a single website and don’t anticipate growth onto other topics or niches. While a personal hosting account may supply you with any number of subdomains, a subdomain is not considered a new website; it is simply a branch off of the main domain name. Personal hosting accounts are in a shared environment, meaning that multiple websites will share the same hard drive and network resources of other websites. You can relate a shared hosting environment to multiple users on a Windows computer; every user will have their own unique desktop and folders, but they share the same hard drive and computer system.

VPS Hosting accounts; a.k.a. virtual private servers and virtual dedicated servers are a similar to both a reseller hosting account and a dedicated server. While a VPS hosting plan will allow you, often times, the ability to host multiple websites in exchange for a flat monthly fee, they do, in a small way, still operate in a shared environment in regards to system resources. What makes a VPS hosting account unique and attractive to most webmasters is that each VPS account will have their own operating system on their own partition of a server. This helps to protect your website from malicious scripts running on other partitions, which is on par with the type of protection offered by a dedicated server, though at a typically lower monthly rate.

A dedicated server offers the ultimate protection against scripts or malicious programs running on 3rd party websites, though it is also the most cost prohibitive choice for new webmasters. A dedicated server offers all of the features of a reseller hosting account and more; often times giving you full reign of the server root and the ability to customize everything on your server from the operating system, the database software and the firewall protection that you use. As mentioned before, the biggest detriment to using a dedicated hosting account is the cost, where the prices per month can range anywhere from $80 per month to well over $400 per month, depending on the company that you choose and the additional features or services that you purchase.

Now that we’ve gone through the list of viable alternatives, a reseller web hosting account is the most cost effective solution for webmasters on a budget who need the ability to manage multiple websites. More times than not, you will have a master control panel that will allow you to set the bandwidth and disk space quota for each website within your account so that you can effectively manage the space and bandwidth allotted to your reseller account.

Most reseller accounts can be picked up for anywhere between $15 per month to $40 per month, and the list of features and options available to you will largely depend on the company offering the reseller hosting accounts.

If you’re a webmaster on a budget who needs the ability to manage multiple websites, it is highly suggested that you check out reseller web hosting, this option will work well for most webmasters on a tight budget yet allowing room for continual growth in the future.