11 FAQs About Reseller Hosting
The best reseller hosting plans include the complete package tools needed to operate your own web hosting brand.
With Windows or Linux reseller hosting plans, you can partition a large pool of server resources to create user-friendly and affordable web hosting plans to sell different levels of service products to customers.
The nuts and bolts of partitioning web server hardware by yourself can be complicated. Resellers must also consider issues with client data security, systems administration, customer support, and uptime guarantees.
Reseller hosting plans that offer a storefront template that matches your business or brand identity are an easier option. White-label products allow you to sell VPS and dedicated server plans at discount rates.
Reseller web hosting is a great solution for web design agencies, independent web developers, small businesses, graphic designers, and freelance programmers.
You can add professional services to your invoices and bill separately for domain name registration, web hosting, design, and development all at once. Even better, many hosting reseller packages include tools to automate sales and order processing.
Here, we’ll cover the basics of reseller hosting, dive into the specific web server configuration options available, and help you determine which providers will be the best fit for your web hosting business.
1. What is Reseller Hosting?
Reseller hosting enables web design firms, freelance professionals, and software programming companies to sell domain names, hosting plans, and other services to clients.
Simply put, a reseller plan involves subleasing some of your server space to others. As a reseller hosting provider, you’ll buy a hosting package from a provider for wholesale rates and set the retail prices and performance specs for your customers.
The advantage of purchasing a reseller hosting plan is that you can build your own web hosting business without a significant investment upfront. Reseller customers save thousands on hosting infrastructure by repackaging and selling ready-made plans.
The best reseller hosting providers offer the ability to white-label their reseller package, meaning you can sell their services as your own web hosting business. The hosting company maintains the infrastructure, but you run the business — and keep the profits.
Linux reseller web hosting plans typically provide the same software to help customers manage their reselling business:
- cPanel: Control panel software and user-friendly interface to manage websites and server infrastructure
- WHM: Also known as Web Host Manager, this administration portal lets resellers oversee individual cPanel accounts
- WHMCS: Automation platform that streamlines business functions like client purchases, billing, and customer support
Resellers can use cPanel and WHM to create hosting plans for customers with a unique cPanel account and hardware configurations. Resellers can bill their clients with invoicing at any price they choose to set via WHMCS.
Other forms of reseller hosting offer ready-made storefront apps with all of the products of the main company listed under your own brand and logo.
This allows small business owners in web development to sell shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated server products directly to customers.
A storefront application also includes a payment gateway that will automate eCommerce payments from your customers.
2. Why Should I Use a Reseller Hosting Service?
A reseller service works best for web development companies that provide ongoing maintenance for their client websites and mobile apps.
Following this business model, your company can deliver design, programming, hosting packages, and domain name services together. You can then invoice and bill clients on a monthly or annual basis for their hosting account.
Ultimately, reseller hosting creates an extra revenue stream while also providing an access point for website management and maintenance.
Using WHMCS and cPanel account administration, you can easily manage each client’s services and protect their data security with account segregation and user password login protection.
In addition to domain name registrations, IP addresses, and SSL/TLS certificates, an aspiring web hosting business owner can even often to provision hardware with a different server location.
Each reseller hosting service can operate a little differently. With A2 Hosting, for example, reseller hosts receive at least 60GB of SSD storage to divide among customers as needed. A2 Hosting reseller plans are priced around most VPS hosting services.
Other companies, such as SiteGround, offer more affordable unlimited website hosting plans with a single management dashboard. The lower prices (and smaller plans) let you receive a discount on the wholesale web hosting resources, which you can then mark up to your clients.
If you prefer to host all of your clients on SiteGround, its reseller plan can be a good option to increase margins.
Building your own web hosting site with WHMCS, ClientExec, or Enom for domain name registration can be a lot of work. Using a storefront app or white-label service is much easier to start.
3. How Much Should a Reseller Plan Cost?
In a way, reseller plans compete with shared web hosting that supports unlimited domains with unmetered bandwidth and storage — after all, that’s the service you’ll provide to clients.
However, perhaps a more accurate comparison would be VPS or dedicated hosting options with finite storage capacity and monthly bandwidth allocations for you to distribute as needed.
Here are some of the best deals we’ve found for reseller hosting in 2024. Click on each hosting review to learn more:
- InMotion Hosting: $13.99/month
- A2 Hosting: $15.95/month
- HostGator: $34.99/month
- SiteGround: $4.99/month
- Liquid Web: $99.00/month
The best reseller hosting plans can cost anywhere from $10 to $25 per month depending on the length of the contract commitment.
Some of the main factors to look for are whether or not the licenses for WHMCS and cPanel are included in accounts, as well as how many unique cPanel logins are provided on the plan.
White-label reseller plans allow you to sell products like domain names, VPS plans, dedicated servers, and SSL certificates at whatever price you choose.
Be prepared to grow through multiple tiers or levels of a reseller hosting plan as your company scales. White-label reseller products include managed hosting, datacenter support, and upgrades over time.
Look for a reseller plan at less than $20 per month and scale to higher tiers only as you need them.
4. How Do I Choose the Best Reseller Hosting Provider?
A reseller service works best for web development companies that provide ongoing maintenance contracts for their client websites and mobile apps. In this manner, your company can deliver design, programming, hosting, and domain name services together to clients in one package.
Then you can invoice and bill on a monthly or annual basis on service contracts. Each client gets a unique cPanel login with WHMCS account administration. This is better for data security as it promotes account segregation and user password login protection.
When choosing your next web host, start with an IT audit of the resources (websites, mobile apps, databases, and so on) you expect to oversee to give you an idea of the runtime requirements you’ll need to support.
This means knowing your clients and the websites or mobile apps you will be managing for them on a reseller account, then finding a plan that supplies the hardware, bandwidth, storage, programming language, and database resources required.
With a reseller hosting service, you receive a discount on the web hosting resources as well as the ability to mark-up and rebrand the products of the main company.
If you prefer to host all of your clients on SiteGround, then the company’s reseller plan can be a good option to increase margins. Using a storefront app or white-label service is much easier to get started. Reseller plans without a requirement for a WHMCS license are cheaper.
Hosting Features to Look for in the Best Reseller Hosting Packages:
- WHMCS, cPanel, WHM, ClientExec, and Enom licenses
- Support for Windows or Linux reseller hosting with the proper operating system
- Evaluate if your websites and apps will utilize database frameworks other than MySQL
- Determine the requirements for Linux and Windows Server distributions and licensing
- If you need VPS and dedicated server products, consider the discount price on hardware
White-label reseller stores make it easier to offer VPS plans to customers than configuring your own platform with SolusVM, OpenVZ, Parallels, or Virtuozzo. Your company pockets the difference between the white-label cost of wholesale hardware vs. the price you choose to bill for the services to clients.
White-label stores also allow products to be embedded in websites using APIs. You can offer a full suite of web hosting products to the public as a web hosting brand with a reseller store. Otherwise, you will need an eCommerce solution for your website.
The combination of WHMCS, cPanel, WHM, ClientExec, and Enom is enough to run a web hosting service independently with all of the hosting features of a shared Linux plan. Most WHMCS reseller solutions run on CentOS, Ubuntu, or CloudLinux.
A white-label storefront is much easier to manage than a WHMCS + SolusVM combination, and much cheaper to get started with including VPS and dedicated server support to clients.
5. Do I Need a Dedicated Server for Reseller Hosting?
The requirements of your business client websites and applications will determine whether or not you need a dedicated server on a monthly or annual basis to support a reseller account.
Most power resellers use VPS plans, as virtual private servers can be configured with specifications that can exceed dedicated hardware at cheaper costs.
Unless your security policies specifically require a single-tenant environment, you don’t need a dedicated server.
Reseller hosting can exist on a surprisingly wide variety of hardware configurations, depending on the resources needed to support the reseller’s client base. Here are the most common setups:
- Shared reseller hosting: Cheap and easy to get set up with a reseller site quickly
- VPS reseller plans: Managed white-label products are easier to bill to clients
- Dedicated hosting: Use to orchestrate your own VPS platform with SolusVM
- White-label stores: The best way to integrate products to CMS sites via API
- Discounts or credits: Buy packages at a 20% to 40% discount for resale
Cheap reseller plans operate on the same basis as support for multiple websites on shared hardware plans. Using WHMCS allows you to create a unique cPanel login for each client.
Rather than hosting all your client domains on your own shared hosting plan as a freelance developer, use an unlimited reseller account to separate the accounts and provide the client with a unique login. Then they will not have access to other clients’ websites in accessing their own accounts.
We recommend using WHMCS, WooCommerce, or ClientExec for eCommerce, checkout, and billing on reseller hosting plans, which requires building your own website.
If you are launching your own web hosting brand, a dedicated server could be a minimum requirement for orchestrating a VPS platform. Consider a dedicated server to run OpenVZ, SolusVM, Virtuozzo, or Parallels to build out a VPS platform to support your WHMCS shared hosting plans.
6. Which Web Hosts are Best for Reseller Hosting?
We craft each hosting review with care to make sure the providers we recommend are up to the task of powering you up-and-coming web hosting endeavor. No matter your needs, these are the brands we trust the most:
The Best Web Hosts for Reseller Hosting in 2024:
- InMotion Hosting: High-performance reseller hardware for professional client support
- A2 Hosting: Known for cutting-edge hardware and developer-friedly support
- SiteGround: Affordable packages of shared Linux plans you can resell to clients
- HostGator: Tried, trusted, and true — one of the most popular choices in the industry
- GoDaddy: Sell every product GoDaddy offers in a white-label store with domain names
- Liquid Web: Prides itself on customer service and customized cloud solutions
InMotion reseller hosting offers the best WHMCS and cPanel solution for web developers and web design companies supporting client sites in production. The company’s reseller platform runs on high-speed, cloud VPS hardware with elite configurations and includes all of the licensing for the software you need.
A2 Hosting established web hosting entrepreneurs on its most modern datacenter technologies, including AMD EPYC CPUs and NVMEe drives. Speed is the name of the game with A2 Hosting, which translates to higher SEO rankings, lower bounce rates, and more satisfied customers.
SiteGround gives resellers a wholesale discount on its cloud-powered shared hosting platform for resellers to deliver to clients. The white-labeled platform comes with a singular administrative control panel and managed hosting support from the top-tier SiteGround engineers.
HostGator is the most traditional and popular of all the reseller accounts, with a 20-year history of success. You can scale from the Aluminum to the Platinum reseller plan seamlessly and only pay for the exact resources you need for client app support. HostGator also provides the full package of licenses for WHMCS and cPanel accounts.
GoDaddy is cheaper, offers an easy to customize storefront app with templates, and allows you to offer the complete suite of all the hosting products on their platform to clients.
Liquid Web offers a variety of discounts and special pricing structures for those interested in starting a reseller business. In addition to a special dedicated server configuration, Liquid Web resellers can operate on cloud or VPS solutions. With Liquid Web, you can find some of the most attentive support in the industry, with discounts of up to 20% for managed hosting, SSL certificates, and WHMCS licenses.
7. Is Reseller Hosting Profitable?
As with all business endeavors, your profitability depends on your business plan and execution. A reseller business can add modest supplemental income or even turn into a more lucrative revenue stream.
If you are hoping to scale into a major web hosting brand and Fortune 500 company with a reseller plan, the journey may not be easy. The top 1,000 hosting resellers at HostGator average about 50 client sites under management, while the top reseller at GoDaddy oversees about 20,000 clients.
Most storefront operations are competing against other resellers and established hosting brands for customers in the industry from a position of disadvantage.
The people who have the most success with reseller plans are those who use them to offer web hosting products directly to their personal clients in web design, programming, or app development.
With domain registration reselling, you’ll find it difficult to compete with Namecheap and GoDaddy in pricing using Enom. You will have to offer higher than retail prices to customers to use the service and bill for domain name registrations.
But if keeping this service on your website for customers is important, Enom is the best option for resellers using WHMCS and cPanel. GoDaddy’s combination of storefront app and domain name registration is a great choice for getting started as a reseller with the most options at the cheapest price, with ResellerClub another great option for making profit. Namecheap’s API option could be another solution.
8. How is WHMCS used in Reseller Hosting Plans?
WHMCS allows resellers to create shared hosting plans with different storage, bandwidth, and configuration settings that can then be billed to customers.
The plans can be set to invoice automatically on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. You can manage unique cPanel logins for each client account individually. WHMCS works with the cPanel and WHM combination, which requires CentOS, Ubuntu, or CloudLinux to run.
Main Components of a WHMCS Reseller Plan:
- WHM: Works with cPanel to provide administrative functionality to web servers
- WHMCS: Allows web hosting plans to be billed on an annual or monthly basis
- cPanel: Most popular for domain name, database, FTP, and email configurations
- ClientExec: Used as an eCommerce solution in web hosting similar to WHMCS
- Enom: Offers the ability to franchise as a domain name registrar under white-label
If you want to offer shared cPanel hosting plans to customers with your own brand and price structure, choose a reseller hosting plan with a WHMCS license.
Some companies offer bulk licensing on unique cPanel logins at around $1 each or include a certain number for free in each tier of their reseller plans.
As you grow through different levels of reseller hosting, just upgrade to the next level of plan to receive more SSD storage, monthly bandwidth, or RAM allocations.
WHMCS can also be used for billing products like SSL certificates, dedicated IP addresses, or domain names on a regular basis with automated invoicing.
Make sure that you verify the license price for WHMCS and all of the cPanel accounts allocated to your reseller plan in advance of signing up for a contract.
9. What is the Best Domain Registrar Solution?
Becoming a domain reseller can be a lucrative revenue stream for you business, providing an additional service for clients that can be largely automated on the business side.
GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar and is also one of the most popular reseller hosting platforms for the last 20 years. The ability to combine reseller hosting with integrated domain name registration works best through a GoDaddy storefront, and it is also the cheapest reseller solution in the industry.
Most Popular Domain Name Registrars:
- GoDaddy: 76.6 million domains
- Namecheap: 16.5 million domains
- Tucows: 11.1 million domains
- Google: 7.9 million domains
- Network Solutions: 6.4 million domains
The most popular domain name registrar platform for resellers is Enom, which offers a white-label franchise system with a hefty subscription fee. Make sure that your reseller plan includes a free Enom subscription to save more than $195 annually.
Enom is owned and operated by Tucows, with 22,000 resellers using the platform globally. Depending on your plan’s tier, the pricing may not be low enough to make a profit without overcharging for domains to customers.
NameCheap reseller accounts start around $20 per month with support for 25 cPanel accounts and licensed WHMCS, but you need to use an API for domains.
Domain name registration is a major part of web hosting, but you don’t necessarily need to take on the added work if you don’t want to. In many cases, your clients may prefer to manage their domain name ownership independently and change the DNS settings to point them to your reseller resources.
Many reseller companies provide the ability to customize your own DNS server addresses to match your brand as part of the complete package.
10. Which Reseller Plans Offer White-Label Branding?
Most of the reseller hosts offer some sort of white-label branding, where ResellerClub, Hostwinds, Scala Hosting, and GoDaddy have the best options.
The GoDaddy storefront application allows you to add your logo, change theme colors, set the pricing for white-label products, and launch quickly without any complex configuration using WHMCS.
GreenGeeks and HostPapa make it simple and transparent to rebrand cPanel accounts and invoices with your own logo or theme.
Best Reseller Web Host Providers for White-Label Branding:
- GoDaddy: Best hosting reseller with a storefront plan less than $10 per month
- Hostwinds: Reseller web host with several plans for unlimited websites
- InterServer: Unlimited domains with cPanel and WHMCS package for $20 per month
- GreenGeeks: Free WHM with 25 cPanel licenses for multiple website hosting
- HostPapa: Great hosting solution for technical support on reseller plans
- ResellerClub: The best reseller hosting service for white-label products
WHMCS makes white-label branding standard across all of your billing and invoicing, but a storefront application is easier to manage as an eCommerce store.
We’ve found WHMCS easy for manual billing but more difficult to automate than GoDaddy reseller hosting or ResellerClub. Consider adding live chat into your customer service channels for clients. ClientExec functions as a complete eCommerce store with payment gateways.
Site tools for developers vary depending on the web hosting company that offers a managed reseller plan. Digital marketing promotions may include bonus offers like free SSL certificates, dedicated IP addresses, and software licensing.
Cloud hosting products can be white-labeled through ResellerClub along with optimized WordPress hosting products. ResellerClub is also the best option for white-label VPS hosting, or for elastic servers like Liquid Web offers.
11. How Should I Get Started with a Reseller Host?
To get your new business off the ground with a reseller host, make sure the plan includes free cPanel and WHMCS support to operate a shared Linux reseller hosting platform.
Determine how many unique cPanel login licenses are included on plans that support unlimited websites or unlimited domains. Decide if you are providing hosting services only for personal clients or for business hosting as a web host brand.
How to Start a Successful Reseller Business:
- Start with WHMCS and create your hosting plans with configuration and billing terms
- Use a storefront application to save time and white-label products from top web hosts
- Bill your web development clients directly for shared hosting plans with cPanel accounts
- Provide white label-products at a markup to clients to support VPS and dedicated servers
- Create extra profit by selling SSL certificates, IP addresses, and domain names
Building a hosting company takes more than a reseller web host to be popular. Think of your experiences as a web hosting consumer — what did you love or hate about your hosts?
As the owner of your new reseller hosting business, you decide what features to include in your hosting packages. Bonus features such as unlimited email accounts, ample bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, and a free cPanel license give potential customers a reason to set up a web hosting account with you.
Customer service goes a long way toward keeping clients happy and committed. Consider implementing live chat customer support and an email ticketing system to provide peace of mind.
Trust your business with a proven market leader and innovator like the web hosts we’ve highlighted above.
The Turbo server options at A2 Hosting will guarantee elite hardware configurations and low-density domain allocations on free WHMCS plans. These options compete with Liquid Web and InMotion Hosting for the best reseller hosting account solution for eCommerce stores.
Consider specializing in WordPress hosting to support your web design clients, or offer white-label VPS hosting and dedicated hosting plans to be the best reseller hosting provider.
Build a web hosting service that compliments your web development, mobile app programming, or freelance marketing business requirements to be successful as a hosting reseller.
The best reseller hosting service will include free WHM, free WHMCS, ClientExec, and an Enom license for domain name registrations. As your business takes off, you can even explore becoming a master reseller — reselling reseller hosting to others looking to follow in your footsteps.
