Loads of great comments! I do think this is a subject that isn’t often discussed – my concern is there are some absolutely terrible hosts out there (I’ve written on this blog before about the things we see when support our product, Perch) and a newcomer to reselling may well end up hosting a bunch of clients on an unreliable host with terrible support and really cause a huge amount of work and potential damage to their business for very little money.

What comes through loud and clear is if you are going to resell, then an excellent host is a must so do your homework if you want to go down that route!

@Pete Memset offered a fully managed service where they will do security patches and so on. I think most decent VPS hosts should do that. The advantage of a client taking that out themselves is they have the support relationship with the host and are paying for it so should understand where the responsibility lies.

I’ve never had a problem with clients not understanding the difference between host and web app/CMS developer. I just make sure it is clearly explained at the outset.