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WordPress Hosting VS Reseller Hosting – which should I choose?

20 August 2019

Stuart

There’s not a week that goes by where we don’t field this particular question in support – which plan is better?

WordPress Hosting

Our WordPress Hosting is built in-house from the ground up. This means every single component of the stack (technical term for the bits and bobs that make it all tick) has been chosen with purpose.

Without question, our WordPress Hosting platform is the fastest and most secure option we have for any WordPress website. As I write, more than three years of development and iterative tweaking has gone into what’s now one of the most lightning fast UK solutions available.

From a security perspective, we lock down the platform considerably; after all, we only have one application to keep in mind, so a lot of items we can harden and secure on your behalf. We also run our own in-house security system and security rules on the service. We’re constantly watching the WordPress security landscape and evolving our own systems based on that. As an aside, you’ll routinely see our platform lead Tim at events up and down the country talking about web security.

Lastly, the platform comes with a range of management features that aren’t available on any other hosting plan we offer. Need a staging facility to test your updates before live deployment? The WordPress platform has you covered. Need simple one click SSL, or an auto-deployed free testing domain name? We have you covered. There’s a lot more under the hood as well, suffice to say that it’s our most thoroughly developed and designed plan bar none.

On the flip side the platform won’t host anything but WordPress websites (though you can use a special proxy service to host other applications on other platforms) and isn’t offered in a white label fashion. Moreover, we make certain choices with the platform setup that you can’t change; nothing that 99.9% of websites will ever run into of course.

Reseller Hosting

Our Reseller Hosting plan is completely different under the hood. We currently use the Plesk control panel to run the Reseller Hosting service. Plesk is a third party piece of software we install onto the hosting container, and then hand off to the customer. From there it’s theirs to use as they like.

We install a largely vanilla version of Plesk, which is to say we don’t deviate too much from how the Plesk developers envision their software working; we leave our own tinkering to in-house platforms. This means site’s hosted on a Plesk platform rely on the decisions the developers at Plesk make for their software. That means when it comes to decisions on security and performance, the Reseller platform is dictated largely by the Plesk software roadmap.

The benefit of Reseller Hosting is flexibility and scale at low cost. You can host anything you like (within our terms of course) on the Reseller plan. You can also create an unlimited amount of websites for the same monthly cost. If you have a lot of smaller websites that don’t need fancy bells and whistles, the Reseller plan can be a very cost effective way to host them.

You will of course need to proactively manage these sites and their security. A lot of the management of the account will fall on you, the reseller. Indeed, that name comes from the fact the platform is sold in a white label fashion. The 34SP.com name isn’t mentioned; you’re expected to manage and support your end clients. We can of course help you directly if the service suffers any errors or faults.

So which should I choose?

If you’re looking for the very best WordPress hosting option then without hesitation we’d recommend the WordPress platform every time. In terms of security, performance, and features it’s unmatched.

If you’re looking for the cheapest way to host a large number of domains, and those domains don’t require best in class WordPress performance, Reseller Hosting might be a good option.

If you’re still on the fence, we’re happy to expand more on the points listed here, just drop us an email to support@34sp.com with your concerns and let us know how we can help.

Stuart

Stuart

Hi! I am the the co-founder of 34SP.com and Business Development Director; I've been at this hosting lark for more than twenty two years, ulp.. I oversee multiple areas of our business to ensure 34SP.com products and services are meeting our customer's needs. You can get in touch over on LinkedIn or replying to any of most posts. In my spare time I am exceptionally interested in food and drink, I run several food website and am a multi-award winning, food and drink writer.