Setting up a Reseller Hosting Account | Step by Step Guide

Getting a reseller account up and running doesn’t have to be a long process. The first step is of course getting the right reseller plan, one that both fits into your budget and has enough features to use.

Asura Hosting offers a bunch of cheap reseller hosting plans, all of which come with very essential reseller-based features, to name a few:

• Direct Admin / cPanel
• Free SSL Certificates
• WHMCS / BoxBilling / Etc support
• Dedicated IP’s (On higher tier plans)
• Litespeed
• Softaculous
• 100% White Label
• Site Builder

Once you have chosen the right reseller plan for you, the next step is getting it ready for your clients, whether your a web designer or starting a new web hosting business – the process is always the same. You have to start with your own site first and that begins with setting up a billing program such as WHMCS.

Setting Up WHMCS

WHMCS is rather easy to use, since we offer a 1 click installer with it, you can install it directly within your control panel. Simply visit the Softaculous tab within your domains control panel.

Once there, go to the e-commerce section and select WHMCS.

You will then be asked to fill out some details about the installation, such as:

• Directory Location: Where you would like to install your WHMCS. We recommend to install it within a folder such as clientarea, customers, billing or similar. Try not to install it on the root of your domain. (Without a folder).
• Cron Job Frequency: Basically how often the WHMCS cron-job will run. We recommend to keep this variable to run every hour.
• Company Name: The business name that will be displayed to your users.
• Company Email: Email used to email your customers, which will also be referenced within emails sent out from WHMCS.
• Admin Folder: Where your admin panel will be located. We recommend to keep this on the default setting. (/admin)
• License Key: The license key provided by WHMCS. If you do not have one, you will have to obtain one from a third party provider. We always recommend using WHMCS directly, as they can help you out with any support queries if needed.

Once installed you should now be able to login WHMCS directly through the admin login link, usually which can be found at example.com/whmcs/admin. That particular link would mean that you specified your Directory Folder to be “whmcs” and your admin folder to be “admin”.

Adding your Reseller Hosting Account on WHMCS

Once logged in the first thing you should setup is your server or in this case it will be your reseller account. Go to Setup > Products/Services > Servers

Once there, click on the “Add server” button located on the top left of the page. You should then be shown a form with all server details required to connect your WHMCS installation to it.

• Module: The control panel your reseller account uses, in most cases it is usually cPanel or Direct Admin. Select which ever your reseller account is using.
• Hostname or IP address: The IP address of the server your reseller account is under. If using Asura Hosting, we send through these details when first signing up.
• Username: Reseller accounts username
• Password: Reseller accounts password
• API Token: This can be created within your WHM if using cPanel. An API token is not required by default. You can always use your Username/Password instead.

Once completed, click on “continue anyway” and you should be prompted to enter a couple more details such as your server name (Can be anything) and your own custom nameservers, which we will be getting into next.

Creating your own branded nameservers for your reseller account

Creating branded nameservers such as ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com is essential for your web hosting business to remain whitelabel and for your clients not to know about your parent reseller hosting company as it can cause conflicting interests between the 2 parties, as the parent hosting company could be competing directly with your business if you let your clients know about it.

The first step in setting up your branded nameservers is knowing your reseller accounts IP address, which should be provided by your reseller hosting company. Once you know the IP address, simply go to your registrar (Where you registered your domain name) and look for a “Custom Nameservers” or “Child Nameserver” setting for your domain. You should then be able to directly register your new branded nameservers there along with the servers IP.

With Asura Hosting, we have this feature labeled as “Private Nameservers” within your client area located at Domains > View Domains > Your Domain > Private Nameservers

Once your branded nameservers have been registered, you can then provide it to your users. You can also use your own nameservers on your domain.

Creating Web Hosting Packages

The next step is creating your own web hosting plans, I will be using Direct Admin in this guide.

• Login to your Reseller accounts dashboard and visit the “manage user packages” icon.

• Click on the “Add Package” button towards the top-right of the screen.

You will then be prompted to enter the hosting package specifications. A quick summary of the most important account features:

• Bandwidth: Amount of network bandwidth the account can use.
• Disk Space: Amount of data that can be stored within the hosting account.
• Inodes: Basically the amount of files a account can use, we suggest keeping this setting unlimited.
• Domains: Amount of domains that can be added to a hosting account.
• Sub-Domains: Amount of sub-domains that can be added to the hosting account. (subdomain.example.com)

Adding your newly created web hosting plans to WHMCS

To add your newly created web hosting plans, login to your WHMCS admin area and go to Setup > Products/Services > Products/Services > Create New Product

There are a couple of details you will have to fill out, such as billing terms, pricing and description. The most important part of getting WHMCS to recognize the hosting account is under the “Module” Tab.

Here are the fields that will need to be filled out:

• Module Name: Control Panel you are using, usually Direct Admin or cPanel.
• Server Group: The server the hosting plan is under.
• Package: Select the web hosting package under the drop-down list.

Once the web hosting plan has been added, WHMCS should provide a direct link to the hosting plan under the “links” tab. The direct link is the link you should use on your websites landing page.