Selling Hosting with Reseller Hosting: Packages, Accounts and Branding in WHM

Reseller hosting is a package in which, under a single service, you create separate cPanel accounts for your customers through the WHM panel and sell hosting under your own brand. Server management stays with the provider; you manage the packages, the accounts and the customer relationship. This article covers the initial setup to do in WHM after buying a reseller hosting package, account planning and the choice between reseller hosting and a VDS.

Who is reseller hosting for?

• Web design agencies: you also provide the hosting for the sites you build and earn regular income from yearly renewals.
• Freelance developers: you monitor customer sites from a single panel and give each customer their own cPanel login.
• Businesses with more than one brand: by keeping each site in a separate account, a problem on one does not spread to another.

The difference between WHM and cPanel

WHM is your panel: you define packages, create accounts, suspend them and change quotas. cPanel is your customer's panel: they handle files, email, databases and SSL within their own account. Your customer does not see WHM or your other customers. To get to know the cPanel side, you can read the guide What is cPanel hosting.

Fiberserver reseller packages

All three packages include WHM access, unlimited traffic, unlimited email accounts and databases, LiteSpeed, CloudLinux and a free SSL certificate for every account. Resource limits are per account: when one customer's site gets busy, your other customers are not affected.

Initial setup in WHM: 4 steps

1. Define your packages

Open the Packages > Add a Package screen in WHM. For each plan you will sell, enter the disk quota, monthly bandwidth, and the limits for email accounts, databases and subdomains. Starting with two or three packages is enough, for example "Starter 1 GB", "Business 3 GB", "E-commerce 5 GB". The disk quota cannot exceed the per-account upper limit allowed by your package.

2. Create the first account

On the Account Functions > Create a New Account screen, enter the domain name, username, password and the customer's email address, and select the package you have just defined. The account is created in a few seconds; your customer logs in at yourdomain.com/cpanel. Once the domain name's nameserver records point to the server, the site goes live and the SSL certificate is installed automatically.

3. Manage the accounts

List Accounts shows all accounts together with their disk usage. You suspend an account with an overdue payment using Suspend and reopen it with Unsuspend when the payment arrives. When a customer grows, you change their package with Upgrade/Downgrade an Account; there is no need to migrate the site.

4. Set up billing and support

With a few customers you can keep track of invoices by hand. As the number of customers grows, a hosting automation system such as WISECP or WHMCS connects to WHM and handles orders, invoices, account creation and suspension for you. You are your customers' first line of support; for infrastructure matters, you write to our support team.

How many accounts, which package?

Base the calculation on two numbers: the number of customers you have today and the number of sites you expect to add in a year. An agency with 6 customers that delivers 5-6 sites a year stays on the 10-account package in its first year. An agency approaching 20 sites needs to move to the 30-account package. On the disk side, an average business website takes up 1-2 GB including its email; divide the total disk accordingly and do not allocate more to the accounts than your total disk.

Reseller hosting or VDS?

If you do not want to manage a server, reseller hosting is the right choice. If you need to install custom software or use all the resources on your own, you install a panel on a Türkiye VDS; the steps are in the guide to installing cPanel on a VDS.

Three common mistakes

• Putting all customers in a single cPanel account. Sites added as addon domains share the same resources and the same file space; malware that gets into one reaches all of them. Create a separate account for each customer.
• Over-allocating disk. If the total of the quotas you define exceeds your package's disk, emails and uploads stop the first time it fills up.
• Leaving backups to the customer. When a customer breaks their site, you are the one who gets the call. Download backups of important sites from cPanel regularly or use off-server backup space.

If you are ready, compare the reseller hosting packages; our support team will help with migrating your existing customer sites.