Why Designers Need a Reseller Hosting Account

 

Even if you don’t resell hosting to your design clients, here are 10 reasons why getting a reseller (WHM) account will improve your business.

What is a Reseller (WHM) Account?

Basically, it’s a big chunk of host disk space and system resources that is divided into smaller packages.

In other words, you control a bunch of shared hosting accounts, just like the host.

Put a Real Wall between Accounts

It’s common practice for beginner designers to build client sites in sub-folders where their own site is located.

That practice became super risky in 2013 when all security hell broke loose.

Having multiple sites under one cPanel account is now a huge security and performance risk.

That’s true for all site owners, not just designers.

cPanel Level Control

The very best part of having a reseller account is that you can house each site in its own cPanel.

That includes having your own site isolated from all client sites.

Here’s why having a cPanel container for each site is important.

Security is Stronger

You can establish root-level security for each site.

Every site would have its own .htaccess, robots.txt, database, domain, and more.

Those security files are super important!

If your own site is in the root of the account, then its .htaccess and robots.txt applies to all other sites in sub-folders under that account.

If your site or any sub-folder site has a major issue, there is no real wall between it and your site either.

Performance is Faster

Each site has its own allotment of system resources.

Those include:

• Disk space
• CPU
• Memory
• Bandwidth

Here’s how this setup protects your client’s sites.

What if a post on your site goes viral or it gets a massive botnet hit?

With your site in its own cPanel, you would not be hogging all the resource covers of the whole account and leaving your clients out in the cold.

While it’s not likely that the client sites you’re building will get a massive hit from bots or traffic that would cause resource overages, it could happen. And having your site isolated from them protects you too.

CloudFlare Isolation

Designers need to see changes as they happen. That means no caching of any kind.

By having each site in its own cPanel, and using a different domain, you could retain the benefits of CloudFlare on your own site while having it off on the client builds.

For example, I use the domain myblogaid.net for all of my client sandbox sites and testing sites. It isn’t on CloudFlare, so it doesn’t impact my main domain and its sub-domains where I have my 2 member sites (Site Success Courses and Webmaster Training).

Access is Restricted

You can create FTP and other access accounts for just that site.

What if you, or the client, need to hire a developer, or other 3rd party agency to the project?

With a client site isolated in its own cPanel, you can safely give full login credentials without exposing the ones for your own site.

PHP Level

Depending on the type of reseller account you get, you might be able to control the PHP level on each site.

That’s important for bringing outdated sites up to speed.

You could migrate in their old site and match their current PHP version too, ensuring that nothing breaks.

You can bring them up to a more current PHP level after you’ve worked through updates on the site.

Backups are Smaller

Its way easier to control what’s in the backup file of a site when it’s completely isolated from all other sites on the account.

That eases incremental backups as you’re building the client site and can make it easier to migrate using plugins that offer both backups and migration tools such as UpDraftPlus and BackupBuddy.

Plus, it makes it a whale of a lot easier to exclude the other sites from the backup of your own site!

Migration is Easier

You (or your host) can migrate the entire cPanel to the client’s host.

Most hosts will do a cPanel migration for free, just like they do when a client moves to a new host.

Now, this does require that you add a few things to your checklist when initially setting up the cPanel account, and a few easy tweaks just prior to the migration, but both of them are faster than the manual migration process when moving a client’s build to their own hosting.

Removal is Easier

When you’re finished with the design and want to removed the site files and database, you don’t have to do them individually.

You can simply delete the entire cPanel. Poof!

Affiliate Sales

If you’re on a speedy host, your clients are going to get used to how fast their site runs.

That will make it super easy to recommend they use your hosting affiliate link too.

And then you know they will not be on some junk host that will make it a nightmare for you to secure and maintain later as well.

Getting Paid

To ensure you get paid for all your work, you most definitely do not want to design the site on the client’s host under their domain, even if it’s a sub-domain.

Placing the build under your own account guarantees that you maintain control over it until you get paid.

Reseller Account Types and Pricing

Even when they know better, some designers don’t move up to a reseller account due to cost.

Most hosts only offer reseller accounts on VPS, and that can be super pricey, to the tune of $400-$800/yr.

A2 Hosting (aff link) has a sweet shared hosting reseller account that is very affordable.

In fact, I moved to it from VPS and it has saved me a bunch!

I use it to create sandbox sites for my training clients.

And if the client wants a custom design, I can give the designer full cPanel access. Plus, it makes backups and migration super simple too.

I also use it to create all of my testing sites for trying out new plugins .

And benchmark case studies, like the ones I do on hosting or caching plugins.

Need More Help?

Want to learn how to set up sites securely and guarantee peak performance?

See my Webmaster Training for the hard-to-find tutorials on the skills you need to get the job done.