Reseller hosting plans have been around for about a decade and they’ve seen their rise in popularity in the beginning and major fall just a couple of year ago. When hosting offers for the masses were few, and the market wasn’t so overcrowded, anyone could get a reseller account and sell their own hosting packages at higher prices.

But those times are long gone, and now only established big corporations can make money from selling very cheap hosting packages, as they already have the data centers and infrastructure and don’t need to invest too much into marketing because everyone already knows them. Still, reseller hosting plans are useful for a variety of reasons, most of which are detailed and explained below.

You can still make money. There are thousands of people that make a living out of reselling hosting accounts. Usually, they specialize on a single specific niche, like hosting packages for starting web designers, and provide everything those designers need, like the best tools, a set of instructions, free utilities, and other things that would compel them to sign up with the reseller and not with another company or even the original hosting provider. Another way of making money with reseller hosting is offering the hosting accounts for free in exchange for a service like filling out a CPA offer, testing new software, filling up a survey, etc.

You can use your hosting packages as gifts or rewards. This is a great way of using a hosting package. As I said above, a lot of people give their accounts away for free in exchange for a service or something of value (so they still make money). You can also give them away as gifts for a contest, bonus for buying one of your products (for example, if you’re selling a book on web development, you can give a free hosting account with the necessary development tools to everyone who buys it; it’s easier to manage than it sounds) or find other creative ways to use your reseller account. If you want to go further, you can also offer only one year free, then renew the account and bill the customer. It doesn’t sound too ethical, but it’s a good business model used by thousands of people online.

You can use them for your own purposes. You can buy your own accounts (though some hosting companies disallow that) and use them for whatever you want. Usually, they’re perfect replacements for multiple IPs on a dedicated server, which would be much more expensive. Inmost cases, it is also much easier to manage all of your accounts through a reseller account that through a hosting company’s custom panel.

Because the hosting company still deals with customer support (unless you want otherwise), you are relatively free from all the burdensome maintenance you’d usually do if you had your own dedicated servers. Having a reseller account can be a great thing once you know how to properly use it, so if you have the time and the money, you should definitely try one of the above ideas.