There is a fair bit of confusion when it comes to Website Hosting Services. As a Canadian wanting to use a Canadian Hosting Service to keep everything in Canada and your privacy private, you may end up setting up with some one local but then end up being on a website hosting service in the states or elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, there are a large number of resellers out there that claim to do website hosting but then just reselling someone else’s service. So first, let’s take a look at what a reseller is.
A Reseller is, simply put, a person who sells you the services of someone else. There are many names for these resellers, but I love to refer to them as middlemen. They can either buy a single or reseller package and then sell it off to their own clients legally and often at a marked up cost. For instance, a reseller would purchase our Coral Hosting Plan for $3 a month (or $39.95 a year) and then charge their customer the price of around $5 to $6 a month. As you can see you could have paid almost half of what you did as a customer if you had signed up for the hosting yourself, but your Reseller would be upset that they are not getting those residual fees from you.
There are also commission based accounts, where a reseller will receive a portions of the funds you pay when you buy into a hosting package. Most resellers will design websites and will resell website hosting services to you and pressure you to use their services if you want your design to be completed. The reason for this is their payment, commission or familiarity with the service they are reselling. If you suggest that you have already purchased a hosting service and they are to use that, there is a good chance you are going to receive feedback or pressure from the reseller to change and try to get your money back or refusal to complete a project.
In order to tell if the provider is a reseller, try to find out one of their customers and visit https://whois.domainttools.com. Use the provided domain name and view the IP Location record that comes up. If the Location comes up as AWS Amazon, GoDaddy or Provo – Utah there is a good chance they are a reseller.
