Is this a worthwhile pursuit? Or is the market simply too over-saturated for it to be worth a risk?
It's a marketing driven business... How good are you at lead generation?
It's support intensive. You're essentially losing money every time you talk to your customers.
It's a utility business. You will never hear from your customers unless something is broken, and they'll be enraged that their site isn't up 24x7. If they botch their HTML, they'll blame you. If the have an old version of WordPress and it gets exploited, they'll blame you.
It's LOUSY hours. Stuff breaks at weird times. All upgrades have to happen at weird times.
(I ran a hosting biz for a while as part of my consulting biz. We bought a hosting company, ran it for 2 years, and then sold it-- for a tidy profit. But I would never touch that business again).
I would recommend you do a bit more research before building a basic hosting service. You'll be competing with people who charge a couple of bucks per month for service. It takes an awful lot of customers to make a living out of $2/month agreements (many of whom will disappear after the first month or two, so customer acquisition will be a constant struggle).
I would almost certainly recommend you aim for the high end of the market rather than the low. You can't do it with a cPanel plan from Hostgator, however. You'll need one or more dedicated servers with a good method of backing it up (either to S3 or to a file share at your hosting provider). From there, pick a niche that you love (Ruby on Rails, Python/Django, PHP with some framework or application, etc.) and build a really nice service based on providing the best possible user experience for deploying that kind of application. Or, focus on your local market, and build relationships with small businesses in your area. In either case, you can charge a premium for good service, and because you're offering a very focused set of features (either support for a complex set of tools, or a local personal touch, or something else) you won't be competing with every hosting provider in the world (of which there are thousands or tens of thousands depending on your definition of hosting provider).
There's no sense in having your customers have to wait through a chain of three companies (counting yours) before their support tickets get resolved.
I personally won't allow any money to ride on a machine to which I do not have root. :)
One suggestion is don't compete on price. You'll never win. Find something else like quality or customer service.
I personally use a reseller account because I like not having to worry about server security. Plus I can host multiple websites and friends/family at little to no cost.
As for is it worthwhile? Well, how many friends do you know? If you have a big social network and can convince them then yeah, you can make some money off of it. A buddy of mine started reselling hosting packages from a tier 2 service provider and slowly graduated into buying his own racks and providing better products. It's enough to get him a house and a comfortable living but it also took him 5 years of hustling and bustling and a friends and moderators of a tech-oriented web forum to continuously market for him.
If you scour the forums, it's typical that you'll find ads for them as well. And as for the guy that said you'll be fielding the tech questions: that's really true. Some service providers will be doing that for you, it depends on who you pick to partner with.
Should you get into it? Only if you do a bit more research than just pitching a question on Hacker News.
Suggestions on where to start:
http://www.webhostingsearch.com/reseller-web-hosting.php