So in terms of support, revenue, growth potential. What should I be focusing on? I'm really thinking to do shared and reseller or create two brands.. one for each.

theres no reason why you cant do both? It used to be thought that offering shared hosting was a conflict of interest if you sell reseller hosting, but I've never really agreee!

But which is lower support costs? I would imagine that you need stronger skilled staff for resellers but more support for shared accounts for the same amount of revenue coming in.

I would lean towards doing what I knew the most about, and what I enjoyed doing the most. I mean isn't that why you're being your own boss in the first place?
good luck

If you have a site listed as for sale and parked can it still be used while it's parked?

Your hoster may provide this support for your clients or if you feel you should do that yourself you may consider outsourcing to be the way out.

Certainly, you can park a very active site or domain name until it's sold and make money at the same time, since some of them pay you, and when it's sold you'll hand it over to the buyer and take your money.

I think that you would be better off with the reseller hosting. If you would like to sell space on a server you rent you would get more for your money on a reseller plan.

Shared offers support for you and you only. There would be no support for any clients of yours. You would have to call support and get an problems resolved.

Reseller offers a lot more. Most resellers will support you and any issues your clients have. They usually offer a control panel for you (master panel) and a control panel for your customer (client panel) It makes things a lot more streamlined.

In terms of providing support, you may want to utilize a support ticket system to cut down on initial costs.


Good Luck,

Chris

It depends on what you want to do, because you share a server if you want a web site hosted only and your could be doing anything. But you use a reseller service if you want to go out and offer a web hosting service, and these two are totally different services that cannot mix or reside on the same server and have different support system.

What are you looking to do?

If you own a lot of sites or you would like to try selling space go with a reseller account. They do not cost to much at all and sometimes you will get much better support from the host if you have one.

What exactly do you want to do?

Here's a very good explanation of the difference between shared and reselling plans. When I was choosing b/w shared and reselling, I went for shared, as I needed confidence, and the fact that I buy services from the upstream provider hqhost.net, and not from reseller means a lot to me.

I started my web hosting business from a shared hosting and than when I got enough experience I bought a reseller account from ahosting.biz and I'm with them until now.

I've been studying the number of options the avarage company offers, and it's almost always not more than 3, like shared hosting, reselling and dedicated or sometimes reselling, VPS and dedicated.
Since you need to learn the ropes, I'd recommend to focus on either shared or reselling, and then move to the new area.
In case you are considering reselling packages to start with, have a look at valuhost.com and onthespothosting.net reselling options.