Reseller Hosting

What is reseller hosting and how does it work?

Reseller hosting is a wholesale model in which you distribute the disk, account and resource quota you get from the provider to your own customers as separate hosting accounts. Server hardware, the operating system, security and network connectivity stay with LIONFIN; you open customer accounts, define their packages and bill them.

The model has three layers:

• LIONFIN: server infrastructure, NVMe storage, network, operating system updates, backup infrastructure and 24/7 monitoring.
• You (the reseller): open customer accounts from the WHM panel, define resource packages and give your customers first-line support.
• Your customer: manages their site, email and databases with their own cPanel account and cannot see your other customers’ accounts.

Thanks to white-label nameservers, your customers point their domains to addresses carrying your brand, such as ns1.yourbrand.com.

Who is reseller hosting for?

Reseller hosting suits anyone who hosts several clients’ sites and wants to give each client a separate panel, separate resources and a separate invoice. It requires no server administration knowledge; knowing how to use WHM and cPanel is enough.

• Web design agencies: take on hosting for the sites you deliver and earn recurring revenue, without having to send clients to another provider.
• Freelance developers: manage client sites from a single WHM panel and give each client their own cPanel login.
• New hosting ventures: start selling hosting under your own brand without investing in servers, and grow as your customer base builds.
• Companies with several brands: open a separate account for each brand or dealer to keep resources and access apart.

If you only host your own sites and will not give clients a panel, reseller hosting is more complex than you need; a multi-site cPanel hosting plan or a business hosting plan with dedicated resources is a better fit.

What is included in a reseller hosting plan?

Every reseller hosting plan includes NVMe storage, the WHM management panel, a cPanel account per customer, white-label nameservers, free AutoSSL per account and daily backups. Higher plans add business-scale needs such as resource isolation, package templates and a dedicated IP.

For rows marked “depends on plan”, the feature list on the plan card is authoritative. The number of cPanel accounts you can open, total disk space and backup retention are shown in the plan table on this page.

How do you choose between Reseller Starter, Pro and Business?

Two figures matter when choosing a reseller hosting plan: how many customer accounts you will open and how much disk they will use in total. The real difference between the plans, however, lies in resource isolation and branding features, which matter more as your customer count grows.

• Reseller Starter: an agency or freelancer starting out with a few dozen small client sites. WHM, white-label nameservers and AutoSSL per account give you a professional start.
• Reseller Pro: resellers with a growing customer base who want to sell different resource packages to each client. CloudLinux stops one customer’s overload from affecting the others, and custom package templates let you define your own products such as “Small”, “Medium” and “Large”.
• Reseller Business: firms running hosting as their main source of revenue. A dedicated nameserver IP address makes your brand independent of the infrastructure, and this plan has the largest account and disk quota and the longest backup retention.

As your customer count grows, the isolation CloudLinux provides becomes indispensable in practice: one customer’s broken plugin or attacked site must not turn into complaints from all your other customers.

How do you create a customer account with WHM?

Creating a customer account in WHM takes two steps: first you define a package that sets resource limits, then you create a cPanel account for the customer by choosing that package. Defining packages saves you entering limits one by one for every new customer and keeps the panel in line with your price list.

1. Create a package: on the Packages → Add a Package screen in WHM, set limits such as disk quota, monthly bandwidth and the number of mailboxes, databases and domains.
2. Create the account: on the Account Functions → Create a New Account screen, enter the customer’s domain, cPanel username and password, and choose the package you prepared.
3. Enter the contact email correctly: password resets and quota warnings go to this address.
4. Send the details: send the cPanel login address, username and nameserver details to your customer over a secure channel.
5. Check SSL: once the customer’s domain points to your nameservers, AutoSSL issues the certificate automatically.

Suspending accounts, resetting passwords and changing packages are also done from the Account Functions menu.

How do you set up white-label nameservers?

White-label nameservers let your customers point their domains to ns1.yourbrand.com and ns2.yourbrand.com, addresses that carry your brand rather than LIONFIN’s. Setup simply means defining “child nameservers” on your own domain.

1. Find the IP addresses: the IP addresses your nameservers will point to are listed in your service details; if you cannot find them, ask through a support ticket.
2. Define child nameservers: in the panel of the registrar where your brand domain is registered, create the ns1 and ns2 child nameservers with these IP addresses.
3. Wait for propagation: the registry change can take a few hours to spread across the internet.
4. Tell your customers: send new customers your own nameservers along with their account details.

The Reseller Business plan also gives your nameservers a dedicated IP address, so your nameserver addresses do not share an IP with other resellers and your brand is more independent of infrastructure changes.

Why do CloudLinux per-account resource limits matter?

CloudLinux is an operating system that runs each cPanel account inside a lightweight virtual container (LVE), limiting CPU, memory, concurrent processes and disk I/O per account. It is included on the Reseller Pro and Business plans and is one of the most critical features of reseller hosting.

Without CloudLinux, a faulty loop on one customer’s site, a login page under attack or a sudden traffic spike can slow down all your other customers on the same plan. With CloudLinux, that account only hits its own limit; the others are unaffected.

Being able to explain these limits clearly to your customers saves a lot of support time.

How are SSL, backups and security managed on reseller hosting?

On reseller hosting, a free AutoSSL certificate is issued automatically for every customer account, accounts are backed up daily and network-level protection is provided by the LIONFIN infrastructure. The RouteFence firewall filters DDoS traffic, and servers are monitored by 24/7 NOC and SOC teams.

What falls under your responsibility as a reseller:

• Restore requests: when a customer loses a file or database they come to you, and you pass the restore request to the support team with the account name, scope and date.
• Abuse: you are also responsible when customers send spam, host malware or infringe copyright; state these rules clearly in your terms of service.
• Access security: use a strong password and two-factor authentication on your WHM account; the WHM password is the key to every customer account.
• Outdated sites: CMS installations that have not been updated for years are the most frequently compromised accounts; encourage customers to update regularly.

Do not promise customers longer backup retention than your plan provides. If you will promise longer retention, you need to set up an extra backup layer following the 3-2-1 backup rule.

How should customer support be divided?

On reseller hosting, your customers come to you and you come to LIONFIN: the reseller provides first-line support, and infrastructure and server issues are passed to the LIONFIN support team. This arrangement gives your customers an experience consistent with your brand.

You open support tickets with LIONFIN 24/7 from the Support section of the customer panel; the support team works in Turkish. Including the affected cPanel username, domain and the symptom reported by the customer shortens resolution time. Collecting your customers’ frequent questions in your own knowledge base noticeably reduces your support load.

How do you set up billing and automation?

The way to scale a reseller hosting business is to automate ordering, billing and account creation. With a few customers, invoicing by hand and opening accounts in WHM is manageable; as your customer count grows, automation software becomes essential.

Hosting automation software such as WHMCS takes care of:

• creating the account in WHM automatically when a customer chooses a package on your site and pays,
• issuing renewal invoices on time and sending reminder emails,
• automatically suspending unpaid services and reactivating them after payment,
• collecting support tickets in a single customer portal.

Automation licences are offered on the control panel and automation licenses page. Automation software connects to WHM through its API; you create the access credentials for the connection in WHM. When preparing your price list, remember to add VAT or sales tax, payment provider fees and the time you will spend on support to your costs.

How do you find customers with reseller hosting?

With reseller hosting, the first customers usually come from existing relationships: companies whose websites you built, small businesses around you and customers who recommend you. Hosting is a product sold on trust and service quality rather than price, which gives agencies and freelancers a natural advantage.

• Offer bundles: present website design together with hosting, domain and maintenance as an annual package.
• Add a maintenance contract: a monthly maintenance plan covering updates, backup checks and small content changes increases recurring revenue.
• Specialise: focusing on a particular sector (restaurants, clinics, real estate) or a particular platform (WordPress, OpenCart) sets you apart from competitors.
• Make moving easy: offer free migration to customers at other providers; cPanel-to-cPanel migration is a standard operation.

Reseller hosting or a VPS, and what about Windows customers?

If you want to sell hosting without managing a server, choose reseller hosting; if you want root access, your own software stack and control of the whole server, a VPS is the right choice. To sell hosting on a VPS, you have to take care of the cPanel licence, security updates, backups and monitoring yourself.

The reseller hosting vs VPS page covers the switch-over point and cost comparison in detail. If your customers use ASP.NET and MSSQL, look at the Plesk-based Windows reseller hosting plans.