Reseller hosting or a VPS?

It is not features. Both give you cPanel accounts to sell.

It is who is responsible. On a reseller plan we patch the server, watch it and fix it. On a VPS that is you, at whatever hour it happens, and the licences are yours to buy.

The VPS line looks cheaper until the licences go on top. Price the whole stack before you compare, which is the mistake almost everybody makes once.

• The plan is nearly full and upgrading again costs more than a server would
• A customer needs something the shared platform will not allow — a specific PHP build, a daemon, software that needs root
• You want to tune the stack rather than live with a sensible default
• The support load is already yours in practice, so the extra responsibility changes little

Wanting root is not on that list. Root is a cost, not a feature, until you have a use for it.

A [cPanel VPS](route:cpanel-vps) has the panel licence in the price and arrives on one invoice, which removes the part people most often get wrong: buying the server, then discovering the panel costs more than the server.

Add the managed option at checkout and we handle the updates and monitoring, which puts you somewhere between the two — your own resources, somebody else awake at night.