How to Identify Reseller Hosting

• 07 October 2013
• by: Kenny
• in: Tutorial & Guides
• note: no comments

Reseller is playing an important role from web hosting industry. When you want to start your own hosting business, reseller is the fastest solution. However, not every reseller strictly follow game rules. Many resellers oversell the limited server space heavily and bring failures to clients web service. Because of this, it's always good to deal with the actual server hosting provider for guaranteed performance. But how could we identify a reseller from actual hosting service? There're several ways we can work out.

Asking
The most direct method. There're several things you can ask to identify their service like the following

• If they're reseller. If you have such doubt, ask them directly. If they're confident about their service, they will give you answer with no hesitation. They don't have to pretend to be a physical server provider in order to get your business. They grow up by offering outstanding server performance and customer support.
• If they can provide reseller plan. Normally, a reseller web hosting provider does not offer reseller option to clients. It's pretty complicated to manage such alpha reseller service so most reseller hosting does not offer this feature to avoid potential problems.
• DC/Server configuration. Ask if they have any video or picture to show their daily maintenance or work in DC. Ask some technical questions about network protection and server setup etc. Resellers do not have access to such facilities so most probably they're not willing to answer. Instead, an end server provider knows everything in details because that's their own properties, they must understand what/how they're doing.

IP Reverse Lookup

The most efficient and technical solution. Just go ahead to ping out the hosting website to get its IP address. Then resolve the IP owner from DNS look up. Normally, a registered IP will keep a record in database which is searchable from lots of online tools like Ultratools. Just enter into the website IP address then it will return the actual company information including full name, Address and contact details etc. Some tools will even tell the IP ranges that're assigned to a group. It's quite useful when you would like to make further investigation to this company.

Obviously, there're multiple extra play arounds to make the identification. As long as you want to, you will get various ideas to proceed. Reseller hosting is not bad at all from technical configuration and it provides people good opportunity to start their own business. The problem is it's being abused by lots of unethical providers. Those people just want to be profitable but think less for end user. Because of this, they bring no actual value to clients and they ruined the overall reputation of reseller service.

What kind of reseller hosting can we trust? Those few bucks per month service with unlimited sub accounts are definitely to be avoid. A decent reseller hosting plan must provide exact resource amount limits so every customer can get guarnateed performance. However for those reseller service configured on VPS, the host company does not have any control for anything. For reseller hosting from VPS server, we recommend to check out this article for identification.

It's important to know what you're going to purchase and how it's organized. Personally, we don't recommend to sign up with reseller hosting unless it's fully trusted by your investigation. We can reduce lots of potential problems by registering with the physical service provider.