I think in the past 2 years the reseller hosting was quite popular and People started their own businesses. But now, not quite sure. It seemed like more people know how to run the servers and they tend to rent a dedicated server to start off the business.

What do you think? What’s the trend of reseller?

In general, the average web hosting customer is more web savvy than they were 5 years ago. I have been in this biz for over 5 years now (ya, a lifetime in internet years), and the average customer thesedays is much more savvy on DNS, domain names, transfers, etc.

As far as running their on servers, most are still not knowledgeable enough to do so.

There has been a huge increase of resellers – mostly down to the ease and low cost of looking like “your own host”.

The market for resellers looking to progress (for us) is now swinging to fully managed VPS – the step below a dedicated. This gives resellers the ability to have “root” and learn DNS, creating reseller accounts, handling ip’s, installing software etc – but knowing that if they break anything we are on hand to fix it or give advice.

Reselling is still a popular way to house multiple accounts for developers.

It is much cost saving to resell hosting than start your own. Currently, there are many competitions out there being service providers and I believe that 80% of them are resellers.

The cost of these unmanaged dedicated servers has gone down significantly which has opened up possibilities for many web developers and entreprenuers to run their own web servers.

There is no doubt that the VPS market is making some headway but I don’t see it as coming close to replacing the traditional reseller shared hosting market just yet. Perhaps with time that like anything in our business will change but currently traditional shared accounts are still strong.