In this article:
As a reseller you have the option of creating hosting packages for your customers. You can determine how much value you would like to attach to the following resources, settings, and options, but in this article you will learn more about them and what they do.
Remember all of these options can be configured differently in separate packages. So if you would like to charge more for upgraded disk space you can do that easily by upgrading your customer’s hosting.
Hosting Resources
Controlling your customer’s hosting resources is one of the primary responsibilities of a reseller host. You control every aspect of your customer’s account, and you can upgrade and downgrade customers as needed.
Resources are different from “settings”. Resources are available functions that can expire or remain unlimited. The following “managed” resources are available to your customers and controlled by you, the reseller.
Disk Quota and Monthly Bandwidth
Disk Quota is the amount of disk space you provide to your customer’s account, measured in megabytes (MB). It is reasonable to restrict your customers disk space usage because you would want to make sure they are using the space for legitimate web site files and not keeping redundant backups.
Monthly Bandwidth is the amount of data your customer has access to each month. This is also measured in megabytes. Most websites of moderate size with little traffic will not require more a few gigabytes each month.
Max FTP Accounts
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Customers will be able to set up FTP accounts with privileges necessary to upload or download files from the server. The important thing to remember is that cPanel creates an FTP account every time your customer sets up an addon domain, so make sure they will have enough FTP accounts available to cover the addon domains their package offers.
Max Email Accounts
Individual email accounts take up very little data, so adding many will not hurt unless the mailboxes start filling up with spam and taking up disk space. This is another option that can be leveraged into higher value packages. For example: a customer can start with a package that offers 5 email accounts, and as their operation grows they may be willing to purchase a package with 10 or more accounts.
Max Databases
A variety of popular web applications utilize SQL databases to store information and settings. For example, if your customer installs a WordPress site it will use 1 database.
Offering Subdomains, Parked Domains, and Addon Domains
The differences between these separate resources can be confusing. It is wise to have an understanding of what these resources offer and how your customers might hope to use them.
Your customers can create subdomains connected to their main domains. For example, blog.domain.com or wiki.domain.com are subdomains of domain.com.
An addon domain can be used as a totally separate website within your customer’s account. It can also be used to create email accounts. Parked domains can also be used similarly, but they do not have a document root, so they cannot host an individual website.
For more information about addon, parked, and subdomains see our full guide.
Hourly Email Relay Limit
Our shared servers come with a limit 250 emails per hour. The rate of 250 emails per hour applies to Reseller accounts as well, but you can submit a bulk email request through your Account Management Panel to increase this limit.
Maximum percentage of Failed or Deferred Messages Per Hourly
This setting will allow a cutoff to failed messages if the majority of mail sending out from a certain domain is bouncing back. For more information about why email would bounce back you can read our full guide regarding email non-delivery issues.
Settings
In the settings box you check the following options:
- Dedicated IP
- Shell Access
- CGI Access
- Digest Authentication at account creation
Unless we have assigned a Dedicated IP to the account you will leave the Dedicated IP option unchecked. However, you may want to grant users Shell access. This option allows advanced users to access their account through a Linux Command Line Interface. Likewise, CGI Access will allow your customers on this package to execute CGI Scripts.
Under the cPanel Theme option you may choose one of the two available cPanel themes that come with your account: x3 and Paper Lantern. The ability to change and update Feature Lists allows further customization as far as which cPanel features you will allow for each package. For example, if you would like your basic package to exclude the addon domain feature you can add a new feature list and deselect Addon Domain Manager. You can create/edit feature lists in WHM under Packages > Feature Manager.
Pre-Configured Packages
Our Reseller Hosting accounts now include three pre-configured packages of different levels: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. You can easily assign a package to an existing account, choose one of these packages when creating cPanel accounts, or customize these packages to suit your pricing needs. This can save time since you don’t have to create packages from scratch. The following guide includes a comparison chart of the packages along with additional details.
