As a reseller it is easy to keep a close watch on your customers webspace but not on their bandwidth and this is the reason why many resellers end up losing money. 'Live Hosting' purchased a reseller plan with 1 GB of space and unlimited domains for Rs. 10,000 from a web hosting company. They calculated that they would be able to split the space into atleast 50 accounts of 10 and 25 Mb and easily make 5 times their investment.

'Live Hosting' quickly signed-up around 20 customers and all was fine until a few of their clients began to use a huge amount of bandwidth and their monthly bandwidth requirement jumped over 10 GB, which was the limit.

Now the web hosting company demanded a fee of Rs.100 per month for every additional GB. The next 10 GB cost them Rs. 12000/-, which was more than their original plan cost. And their 'unlimited domains' were of no use as the Bandwidth had been exhausted and 'Live Hosting' could not setup a single domain.

'Live Hosting' quickly found a reliable host which charged a little extra but offered a higher bandwidth with generous amount of domains and actually started to 'earn money for themselves'.

Choose a host that gives a realistic amount of bandwidth which is sufficient but not unlimited. All web hosting companies have a limited amount of bandwidth. The cost of adding additional bandwidth is high. This is why bandwidth allotments among web hosting providers vary a great deal. Regardless of your current needs, be aware of the cost of additional bandwidth.

'Streaming Host' wanted a host for a few of his resource hungry clients, he had a yellow pages provider and an active forum and these sites had started attracting huge amounts of traffic. His current host had suggested him to upgrade to a high-bandwidth plan but Streaming Host was not ready to spend those extra rupees and started to shop around till he came across a company advertising Unlimited Bandwidth at a lower cost than his reliable host. And he signed up and moved.

Two months later he received a charge on his credit card that was enough to make him jump and call his new host. He had been billed for bandwidth. The fine print in the agreement defined Unlimited Bandwidth as "as long as it does not exceed allowable limits". Streaming Host had fallen victim to the "unlimited" trap and quickly moved his sites back to his reliable host.

As you start to grow in storage space or bandwidth, the costs go up. Often, hosts will have great intro rates. But as soon as you start to grow in storage space or bandwidth, the costs escalate. Look for a host that has a reasonable growth plan with reasonable prices.

'QuickFlash Hosting' had just found what was an unbelievable price for a reseller hosting plan. The hosting company was offering a generous amount of space, bandwidth and domains for a very low cost. It did not look like a scam as nothing was unlimited. To check, if the offer was really true, they sent a couple of emails and got a response confirming that the prices were the real thing. 'Quick Flash Hosting' was a new company and had to cut costs to make money and they quickly signed up. They designed a professional looking website about their services with great flash presentations and uploaded it. Right from day one, the site would not be accessible quickly; the pages would take a lot of time to show up and even the simple database-driven pricing page would take forever to load and finally the server crashed on the 8th day. It was quickly restored within hours though but the problems continued.

A techie in a web-hosting forum suggested that they perform a reverse-i.p lookup and also check the server configuration. It confirmed their worst fears. A 256 MB Celeron 1.7 Ghz hosting 919 domains. The server was simply overloaded. The web hosting company was flogging a dead horse to make it run that one extra mile and there was no way 'QuickFlash Hosting' could make a reputation for themselves if they offered services on such a web host. So they moved to a hosting company offering more realistic prices...still amazed at how the other 918 domains continued to host on that dead server. Well...they had learnt their lesson.

Web Hosting is a technology-driven Industry. Be careful when you select a host. Choose a host that offers reseller plans on branded high-end servers. Nowadays, anything less than a Dual Xeon Server is not a good option.