Before you pay $24.95 a month or more for that reseller web hosting plan, read this article and at least evaluate all of your options. A reseller plan generally offers you more space and bandwidth then a regular shared hosting plan. However one thing to keep in mind that a reseller plan is still a form of a shared hosting plan. It's not a dedicated server, and there will be other sites on the same IP address and server as yours. So what other alternatives do you have to host multiple sites for one monthly price?

Interesting enough several of the hosting companies that offer these reseller plans are now offering multiple domain name setup on one shared hosting account. What exactly does this mean?

Let's go through a scenario, you signup for a shared hosting account at Hostgator.com. At the time of writing this article, Hostgator is offering unlimited sites hosted on the 3 larger plans of the four they offer. So once you're setup you can login to you cpanel, and through their add-on domains/sub domains link you can begin to add two, three, four or more domains to that one account. Is this a possible feature you can take advantage of?

If you're not running a small hosting company that needs separate admin panel screens for your users to visit, view stats, setup their own email addresses etc. Then this is definitely something you should consider. If you have several medium to small sites you're running online you might as well save the money a reseller plan will cost you and go for a multiple site shared hosting plan.

Another feature you may want to look for at the hosting company of your choice is what their upgrade options are. If you start with a shared hosting plan, with 3000 MB of space and 8 GB of bandwidth and you begin to outgrow it after 6 months to a year. Will your hosting provider allow you to upgrade to a larger account? Will they help move the sites to the new server? Always think down the road and where your web sites will be in 6 months, 1 year.

Since you took the time to read this you may have saved yourself $15 too $20 bucks a month; and remember while a reseller plan offers multiple admin panels and domains it's still a shared hosting plan. So really the only difference between a reseller plan and shared plan is the accessibility to setup your plans, and have separate cpanels. Its kind of a shared plan on steroids, just weigh that info against the price of the plan before you dive in.