As cPanel is now charging for cPanel licenses, it is now more important than ever for reseller accounts to monitor and carefully plan resource usage limits. One of the common strategies to reduce cPanel license costs will be to merge cPanel accounts. This can cause potential issues with reseller accounts pushing account limits that can lead to an account suspension if usage overages are extreme. To help avoid this situation, there are several three main strategies you should use to help you keep this issue in control:
- Communicate – let your account holders know about the limitations of each account. Let your users immediately understand where they stand with resource usage. Timely notifications can prevent many resource usage issues.
- Monitor – carefully watch resource usage. This goes hand-in-hand with communicating usage to your users
- Update accounts – as accounts merge, you may find that your account needs to be updated to have a higher set of resources
Communicate
If you intend to reduce cPanel license costs by merging multiple cPanel accounts into one account, then you should be aware of the usage behavior by each account. After you merge several accounts you should then re-assess the resource usage by the newly merged account. It may require a few days, but take a look at the newly merged accounts and make sure that the resource usage is something that can be handled by your account limits. Let your users know about their resource level usage. If you want more information on handling excessive resource usage, please see What should I do if my account uses excessive resources? You can also learn more about the Common Causes of Excessive Resource Usage.
Monitor
If you’re hosting a website, then monitoring website usage should be one of your primary concerns. As cPanel accounts merge, you will need to be especially aware of the resource usage by the merged account. A reseller administrator on a shared server can see account usage in WHM based on disk space and bandwidth:
- WHM > List Accounts – Lets you see the amount of the disk quota in use
- WHM > View Bandwidth Usage – Lets you see the bandwidth used by an account
If you’re on a VPS or Dedicated server, then you can access much more information. To learn more, please see Understanding Server Loads. To keep your customers happy, always keep a close eye on resource usage. It will help prevent problems for your overall hosting account.
Update or Upgrade
As your accounts grow in size and functionality, there may come a time when you will need to update or upgrade. You can determine the need to update or upgrade based on the resources in use and the resources available for the account. When you’re managing an increase in resource usage consider these questions:
- Will resource use from this account affect any other accounts?
- Will this level of resource usage last for a long period of time?
- What are the causes of the resource usage increase?
- Have you spoken with the account owner to discuss the increase?
- Will the account need to be upgraded? If so, will your budget for the server be affected?
- If you require an upgrade, then will you pass along the cost to your customer? Or does the cost increase affect all of your customers?
- If the resource usage is comfortably within your current hosting server’s parameters, then will modifying the account (updating instead of upgrading) be the best solution for the issue?
Pre-configured account packages that come with a reseller account come in three sizes. You can change the package assigned to an account, or you can customize them to meet the new resource needs of your client.
Congratulations! You now have the knowledge to manage cPanel account mergers that affect your server resource usage.
