Reseller hosting: starting out, pricing and billing

With reseller hosting you buy a block of resources and split it however you like. You create packages under your own name, open accounts for your clients and charge whatever you decide. To the end client, you are the provider: they never speak to us. We keep the server, the network and the power; you keep the business.

It is the natural next step for anyone already building websites who keeps sending each client off to buy hosting on their own, ending up with four different providers and four passwords nobody can find when they are needed.

Two panels, and who uses which

Panel Who signs in, and what for
WHM Yours. Create and delete packages, open accounts, set each one limits, suspend the ones who do not pay, change passwords and watch everyone’s consumption. This is where you run the business.
cPanel Your client’s. Every account you open gets its own cPanel, with files, email, databases and backups, and it cannot see the other accounts.
Shared reseller hosting has no root access. Server configuration is ours: anything that needs it, you ask us. WHM gives you everything you need to run accounts, but not command of the server. If you genuinely need that command, the road is a VPS server or a cloud server.

First steps, in the right order

1 Buy the plan and keep the WHM credentials we send you. Sign in and look around before creating anything.
2 Create your packages, under Packages and then Add Package. A package is a mould: space, number of mailboxes, number of databases, number of FTP accounts. Make few of them, clearly apart. Three is plenty, and three can be explained to a client in ten seconds.
3 Open the first account, under Account Functions and then Create a New Account: the client domain, a username, and the package you picked. The account arrives with cPanel ready to go.
4 Point the client domain at the nameservers we gave you. Until that is done, the account exists but the site does not open. This is where most first attempts get stuck.
5 Decide what happens when somebody goes over: warn, suspend, or both. Set that up before the first client, not after the first fright.
6 Rehearse on a domain of your own. Open a test account, put a real site on it, send and receive mail, and run a restore. Only then bring in the first paying client.
Keep headroom in the block you bought. Selling down to the last GB leaves you nowhere to put the first client who grows, and upgrading in a hurry on a Saturday. Holding back a third is a sound starting rule.

Pricing without fooling yourself

What you charge your clients is yours, and no business of ours. The classic mistake is to divide the plan cost by the maximum number of accounts and call that your cost per client. It is not: a reseller plan never fills up.

When doing the maths Keep in mind
Divide by the accounts you will actually sell Not by the plan maximum. Assume a realistic occupancy, especially in the first year.
Put your own time into the sum What costs you dear is not the disk: it is the support. One call a month per client, times the number of clients, is the real cost of the business.
Bill yearly wherever you can Fewer payments to chase, fewer clients lost to forgetfulness, and the money arrives before you spend it.
Leave margin for your own renewal Your cost can change at renewal. If you priced to the last cent, that change eats the whole margin.
Do not promise more than you have Never promise your clients response times or uptime better than the ones you have with us. What you can promise is in the Support Policy.
Your reseller plan is one single service, and it falls over all at once. If your invoice goes unpaid, the service is suspended after 7 days and terminated at 15, and every client site on it goes down together. Pay with room to spare, and never let your renewal depend on a client who has not paid you yet.

Who answers for what

Matter Whose it is
Supporting your clients Yours. On reseller plans, the reseller is the single point of contact for their own clients. We do not speak to them.
Invoicing and collecting from your clients Yours. We invoice you for the reseller plan; the rest is between you and them.
Creating, suspending, deleting accounts and setting limits Yours, in WHM.
Site content, WordPress, themes and plugins Each site owner. As on any plan, content does not belong to the provider.
Server, network, power and panel updates Ours.
Server configuration and root access Ours. Ask us for whatever you need.
Abuse reports coming from one of your accounts Shared. We act on the account in question and tell you; you deal with the client. See report abuse.

Billing your own clients

At the start you can invoice by hand, and there is nothing wrong with that: with three or four clients, a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder do the job. The trouble shows up around the tenth client, when you spend more time chasing payments than building sites.

From there, automated billing pays for itself: it issues the invoices, warns before the due date, collects, and suspends the ones who do not pay, wired into WHM so accounts open and suspend without you touching anything. What comes with each plan is on the reseller hosting page.

Start with the process, not with the software. Decide first what you do when a client does not pay, and after how many days. Then automate that rule. Automating a rule you have not yet made ends with you switching the automation off at the third awkward case.

Ready to start reselling and unsure which plan to take? Tell us how many clients you have and what kind of sites they run.

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SEE ALSO

Reseller hosting plans

Support Policy

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