Glossary Entry
What is Reseller Hosting?
Reseller Hosting without the jargon — the definition, the analogy, and why any site owner should care.
The short answer
With reseller hosting you buy capacity wholesale and sell it under your own name, using tools that create, limit and run a separate account for every customer.
What follows: the longer explanation, a picture that holds, the practical stakes, and the places you will genuinely meet it.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
0
Jargon left undefined
100+
Entries, all cross-linked
Real
Working examples
Free
To read, always
WHM sits above a set of individual cPanel accounts as the management layer. You define the packages, set the quotas and own the customer relationship, while the provider keeps the hardware and the network running out of sight.
The white labelling goes all the way down: nameservers on your domain, panels wearing your branding, invoices with your name at the top. Add billing software such as WHMCS and the whole arrangement becomes a subscription business that largely runs itself.
A way to picture Reseller Hosting
Buying wholesale rail capacity and selling tickets in your own livery. Passengers deal with you and remember your brand, while maintaining the track remains the infrastructure operator's problem.
Any analogy flattens the detail, naturally — but this one is solid enough to think with, and thinking is what a jargon buster is for.
Why it matters to a site owner
It is the familiar path out of one-off freelance projects and into recurring agency income. Client sites run under your brand at your margin, and the hard boundary around each account makes every client a tidy, portable, billable unit.
Nobody expects you to work at this layer daily. The aim is recognising it when it explains something — and that moment is exactly when this page pays for itself.
One worked example
Thirty client sites sit on one designer's Reseller 2 plan, invoiced at £20 a month each. The plan takes a small share of that income, and every client has exactly one number to ring.
Entirely unremarkable once you have seen it — which is the point: most hosting ideas are plain machinery behind an intimidating label.
Where it sits inside your own account
Here it largely looks after itself, since the defaults are sensible and the panel puts the controls within reach the moment you want them. Read on: WHM, cPanel, WHMCS and Shared Hosting.
The rate you register at is the rate you renew at, so year two costs precisely what year one did — nothing lying in wait on the invoice.
A jargon buster from the people who answer the tickets
An unexplained piece of jargon is, to us, a service defect. This is the support team's collected translations, published where a search engine can hand them over on our behalf.
Hosted somewhere else already? We move the whole site at no charge, usually within 24 hours, and it goes on answering visitors throughout.
- 100+ entries, plain English all the way
- Ordinary analogies, working examples
- Neighbouring ideas linked together
- Written by our own support engineers
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
Jargon-free by design
Definitions written for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — translation rather than restatement.
Tied to real hosting
Examples name platforms you would genuinely use, never an abstract diagram on a whiteboard.
This term, properly landed
Reseller Hosting defined, pictured by analogy and located in your own panel — recognise-level after a single read.
Analogies that hold
Every concept comes with a mental model that returns exactly when you need it.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find it in your own account
Nothing teaches a hosting term faster than finding it in your own panel; five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading.
- 2
Check the defaults as they stand
Look at how your account has it configured. Nine times in ten the default is right, and a check turns the guess into certainty.
- 3
Chase the neighbouring terms
Hosting terms travel in groups — WHM, cPanel and WHMCS finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- The name's first year included when you order annually
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- Mailboxes that answer at the name you hold
- Upgrades applied in place, with no migration when you change plan
- WebP image optimisation built in, at no extra charge
- No set-up charge at any point, and no joining fee
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
- Softaculous included for one-click application installs
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
Will clients know somebody else owns the servers?
Only if you tell them. Nameservers on your own domain, your branding through the panel and invoices in your name leave nothing on show. Your customers see you as the host, with us working quietly behind you as the infrastructure team.
How much support does a reseller take on?
First line is yours: password resets, mailbox setup, general hand-holding, with us behind you whenever the platform itself is at fault. That relationship is the product you are actually selling, and having somewhere to escalate is what stops it consuming your evenings.
Can I choose the PHP version myself?
Yes — PHP is set per site from the control panel, so a legacy application and a current one can run side by side in one account. Extensions and per-site tuning are on the same screen, and none of it goes near a support ticket.
Which control panel do accounts use?
cPanel, the panel the industry standardised on long ago. Every tutorial you find online will match what is on your screen, your backups restore onto any other cPanel host, and the skills stay useful for life. Plesk and DirectAdmin are available on particular plans if you prefer either.
Keep reading
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting places a great many sites on one server and divides both the running costs and the machine's…
WHMCS
Most of the hosting trade runs its billing and automation on WHMCS, which gathers orders, invoices, provisi…
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The reseller hosting buyer's guide, running from definition through to decision.
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