I had thought about becoming a reseller a while back but decided that this really wasn't the direction that I wanted to go with in my business. However, I have been told many times that the easiest way to host multiple domains in one location is by having a reseller account. This makes a lot of sense to me so I am looking into various reseller accounts to find the best deal with the best features. My question is, can I still resell just enough accounts to pay for the hosting and still host all of my sites? I was thinking that this would make it a self-funding proposition for me but I don't want a lot of support headaches.

Opinions on this plan?

If you want the different domains' control panels to be accessed by different people, your easiest bet is a reseller account. If these are all your domains for your own projects, you should be able to find a shared account that will let you host multiple domains with no problems. Multidomain hosting is pretty common for regular shared accounts, not just reseller accounts.

If you want to be able to track anything separate about the sites - disk space usage, bandwidth usage, recent visitors, et cetera...or you want others to be able to have a separate control panel to access their hosting account...you will indeed want to go with a reseller account.

If you will be the only one ever accessing the control panel, and you don't need to track resource usage separately (especially if you're just hosting a bunch of your own sites), you may be able to make a shared account work for you. Just make sure that what you're planning to do doesn't cross the host's TOS (often, shared accounts won't allow you to resell all or even a portion of your account's resources), and make sure that you never hit the bandwidth ceiling (most hosting control panels will provide you a way to check on your resource usage.)

If you want complete control a VPS account may be the way to go.
You can host all of your domains and you shouldn't have a problem selling enough shared plans to cover your costs.

VPS would be a little overkill for what is requested by the OP. However more control is always good too.

I would recommend the reseller account, and sell some of your hosting to maybe friends and family to keep support issues down if all you want is to make it self sufficient so that you don't pay anything really for hosting your own sites.

I disagree. There are very economical VPS solutions out there today and the size of the resources along with the control outweighs taking a chance on a reseller account.

If the OP is looking to host several sites and sell potentially several sites to cover costs or perhaps even make a small profit then I would think VPS would be the way to go.

Of course if we are only talking about a couple of sites then a reseller account would be fine but as soon as you start to take on clients you should be in full control of your server rather than having to depend on the host selling you the reseller account to make changes.

That is right, on a vps you can install any updates, any softwares, recompile apache/php as according to your needs. You have the complete privilege on your server, which infact is a great advantage.

That is assuming the OP is a server admin himself. Otherwise he may still rely on his provider to do this kind of work for him.

There are reseller hosting packages out there that come with anonymous end user support.

Personally, I'm not sure it's work the trouble to become a "hobby host", just to save $10-$20 or so a month.

Hey, you don't need a reseller account you just need a web host that offers you have access to WHM. I know of a company that offers WHM to it's business customers. I don't think I'm allowed to post their address in here, but if you're interested get in contact. It isn't our company.

Depends on what you will have hosted there. If there will be your own web sites - that is ok. but if you have there your web hosting customers - that should be reseller account.
Most compamnies do not allow to resell opn shered web hosting.
Support for your customers as rule not included in shared account

I know that you can't sell hosting accounts from a normal shared hosting account. I was only thinking of selling a few accounts to cover the costs of hosting my own sites. I have 10 right now but am adding more over the next few months as various projects come to fruition. I mainly want to cut my expenses as much as possible as I try to build up my business. The economy has made things a bit tight on the home front so anything I can cut for costs would be helpful.

I don't want to get into VPS, I don't believe. I don't have anything to do with the server side of things and frankly do not have enough knowledge or desire to approach that level.

So - your business - are you a web designer? If you want to sell any hosting packages or disk space, you'll want to go with a reseller account.

If you want to start small and easy, I would suggest going with a reseller account to begin with. You can upgrade to a VPS if / when you reach the point of wanting to control the server environment for yourself or your clients (or even a dedicated server, if you end up with enough clients to support the cost / if you want more room to expand.)

As to when to move from reseller to dedicated...you'll have to run the numbers yourself, look at how much of the "back end" work you'd be required to do on the dedicated plan you're thinking of, and figure out the best time for you to move. Who knows? You might be happy staying at the reseller level for years; or you might find that in a year you're ready to move to a VPS or dedicated where you have a little more flexibility. It's all based on your personal business plan, needs, and budget.

How does a shared host offering access to WHM differ from a reseller account?

Assuming the TOS doesn't forbid reselling, there isn't much of a difference. Though many reseller accounts these days come with free billing software licenses -- which may or may not be important for a particular customer. I'm not sure which part of my post prompted your question though, so perhaps my answer isn't really addressing your question.

I think that there is not much difference there. The only thing is that on the reseller account yopu are allowed resell on shared no. And that is controlled by web hosting provider.

Sure some might think reseller would be best some think it won't but it depends on hosting company and your resources i would say use reseller after all you can earn money while hosting your own accounts you just have to advertise.