According to my research MOST if NOT ALL hosting providers have to purchase their hosting from someone. Am I correct? This would make everyone in the hosting business a reseller!!!! If I am correct, does anyone wish to tell us who you purchase your wholesale hosting from? Afterall if you are not willing to share the information, does this mean that you have a deceptive practice?

To those interested in hosting services dont get all bent out of shape over whether a company is a reseller company or not. If they are not a reseller then how are where did they get their servers????? Where did they get the software and control panel they use? Where did they purchase the equipment they own? There is a price for business, and every viable business must pay a price.

Take Wal-Mart for instance and any other retail store in America. They are all resellers of different brands of products. Would you refuse to shop at Wal-Mart or consider them not a viable company because they chose their products at a wholesale price and resells them at a retail to the general public.

Not all hosting providers are resellers, some operate on virtual private servers or on their own dedicated servers

Where did they get the Virtual Private Server or their own dedicated servers??????? Did they purchase them from someone? There is a cost for the service every hosting company is providing. I would say if everyone really wants to admit it. We all are resellers to some degree. Now everyone may not be an affiliate, such as someone that refers service to another company. I assure you that the service we offer at Fat Daddy Web Hosting has been purchased as most if not all other hosting companies.

VPSs can be purchased from another company and dedicated servers can be purchased from a datacenter or setup by the hosting provider in their own, low-end datacenter. In either case, this is not the same as reselling another hosting provider's services

Resellers sell other provider's services. If I lease a dedicated server and offer my own services off of them, e.g. VPS packages, I'm NOT reselling my provider's services. Your provider may not even offer VPS. Take the case of firms that own their own servers and colocate them at a data center. Let's say they offer VOIP services or shared web hosting from their servers - that's NOT reselling the data centers services. That's not to say there's anything wrong with reselling - most folks start out by reselling. The good ones move on - the bad ones vanish into the hosting cloud.

I understand what you are saying. You own the space on the server you have leased, and you are selling it through your own brand name. I understand there is a difference between this type of selling and what the industry considers reselling. However I think we can agree that when the customer purchases a plan regardless of the industries identification, that service has been purchased and is being resold. The service may have been purchased and resold numerous times before it arrives to the customer. I agree that you have more ownership and control over your servers that you lease compared to one that sells directly through a provider. I think the concept pretty much remains the same it is just two seperate business strategies.

Now....it appears that perhaps some are equating reselling with an affiliate. I am not sure (and I stand to be corrected) if this a fair equation.

A reseller at least the companies I have researched purchases hosting on the front end or back end from another company and resells that hosting at a higher price to recieve a profit. Perhaps I am wrong but the reseller does this through his/her own store, brand name, marketing, and pricing strategies.

An affiliate (correct me if I am wrong) pretty much refers customers to a given company for a percentage of the profits. I.E. COMMISSION

Let's separate this a little further. If a data center that owns its own facilities right down to their parking lot sells shared, VPS, dedicated, colo or cloud services - they are NOT resellers.

If they don't produce their own electricity they must be resellers because they wouldn't be able to sell their product without electricity.

If they don't own the bandwidth they must be resellers. They are buying bandwidth from another source.

That very well may be the case. If you notice in my title it state "Most if not all" On this I would agree with you. However the company that purchases from the Data Center may not be identified as a reseller by the industries standards, but they are through a different strategy reselling a service. It is ok. The retail business is the bread and butter of the world.

I guess what my point is.....I am getting a tid bit of slack from some because I am a so called "RESELLER" when some of the other companies here are buying hosting through another company and reselling it. The strategy and structure may be a little different, but the concept is generally the same. Now if you own your own data center like the illustration above, then perhaps you are a wholesaler rather than someone that buys wholesale and resells retail.

If they are purchasing the electricity wholesale from a supplier and reselling it to others then yes they are a reseller. The same is the case for bandwith.

Reselling electricity is not reselling hosting services and not all clients who colocate offer services to the general public. Data Centers may or may not be the providers of bandwidth to their clients - some opt for cross connects to other carriers.

I understand.

Yet hosting cannot be provided without electricity.
Nor can hosting be provided without bandwidth.

Therefor as a data center you are in fact reselling the electricity you consume because it is built into the cost of the server.
Just like bandwidth.

I agree with what you are saying.....what you are saying and what I am saying are two different things. Read the above posts again. we already talked about this.

No matter where you're in the corporate food chain, you're always some type of reseller when you really start to think about it.