Reseller hosting lets you sell hosting to your own clients without having to build and maintain server infrastructure yourself. It’s a common starting point for web agencies, freelance developers and anyone who manages websites for other people and wants to bring hosting in-house as its own revenue stream. Here’s what’s involved in getting started.
Understanding WHM
Reseller hosting is built around WHM (Web Host Manager), which sits above individual cPanel accounts. Where a regular hosting customer only sees their own cPanel, WHM gives you an administrative layer for creating, managing and monitoring every cPanel account under your reseller plan. From WHM you can:
- Create new cPanel accounts for each client.
- Suspend, unsuspend or terminate accounts.
- Set resource limits (like disk space and bandwidth) per account or per package.
- Monitor overall server and account usage.
Setting up packages
Rather than configuring every client account individually, WHM lets you define packages, which are templates that bundle together a set of resource limits and features. A typical setup might include a few tiers, such as a small package for brochure sites, a mid-tier package for active blogs or small stores, and a larger package for bigger sites. When you create a new account, you assign it a package, and the resource limits are applied automatically. This makes onboarding new clients quick and keeps your offerings consistent.
White-labelling with your own nameservers
One of the more important steps for running a proper hosting business is setting up private (white-label) nameservers, such as ns1.youragency.com.au and ns2.youragency.com.au, instead of pointing clients to generic nameservers. This means your clients see your brand throughout, rather than the underlying infrastructure provider. Setting this up typically involves:
- Registering the nameserver hostnames with your domain registrar, pointing them at the IP addresses provided with your reseller account.
- Configuring the corresponding glue records so the internet knows those nameserver names resolve to those IPs.
- Setting your reseller account in WHM to use these nameservers by default for new accounts.
Once configured, every client account you create can use your own branded nameservers, keeping your hosting business’s identity consistent from the client’s point of view.
Billing your clients
Reseller hosting gives you the infrastructure; how you bill clients is up to you. Many resellers use dedicated billing and provisioning software that integrates with WHM to automate account creation when a client signs up and pays, and to handle recurring invoicing. Others manage a smaller client base manually through direct invoicing. Either way, it’s worth deciding early on:
- Whether you’ll offer monthly or annual billing (or both).
- What your own package pricing will be, on top of your reseller hosting cost.
- How you’ll handle upgrades, downgrades and cancellations for individual client accounts.
Setting client expectations
As a reseller, you become the first point of contact for your clients’ hosting questions, so it’s worth being clear with them about what’s included in their plan, such as storage limits, email accounts and any WordPress management tools available through WP Toolkit. Clear documentation or a simple client-facing FAQ can save you repeating the same explanations.
Why reseller hosting over building your own servers
Building and maintaining your own hosting servers involves a significant amount of infrastructure work: hardware, networking, security patching and backups. Reseller hosting removes that layer, since the underlying servers, backups and infrastructure are managed for you, while you focus on your packages, your branding and your clients. Skyrack’s reseller hosting includes WHM access, hourly backups and no lock-in contracts, so you can start small and scale your package offerings as your client base grows.
Next steps
Ready to set up your own hosting business? Take a look at our reseller hosting plans starting from $44.98/month.