Reseller Buying Desk
Web hosting for beginners — The account you hand a first-timer, and the tickets it sends you
Your client has never seen a control panel, so every question they cannot answer themselves arrives in your inbox with your logo at the top of it.
Straight answer first
Put a first-time client on a Launch account at $2.42/mo and price the handholding rather than the disk — the plan you choose barely moves your cost of goods, while the number of questions the client cannot answer alone moves your labour bill enormously.
The rest of this page is the operational half: what the client actually sees after you press create, what one beginner account costs you across a year once support time is counted, the four tickets that reliably arrive first, and what changes in your working week once forty of these accounts are on the shelf.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 24 August 2026
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Cover behind your support desk
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A beginner is not a difficult customer. A beginner is a predictable customer, and predictable is something you can price. The mistake is treating the plan choice as the decision — it is not, because the difference between the cheapest shelf and the middle one is a couple of dollars, while the difference between a client who can find their own webmail login and one who cannot is several hours a year.
Everything here is written from the reseller's side of the counter. Where a figure appears it is our published one: Launch at $2.42/mo, Pro at $4.66/mo, Elite at $7.08/mo, and reseller plans from $14.99/mo plus $0.40 per active user. What you charge on top is your business; what it costs you underneath is what this page is for.
What the client sees on day one
The welcome email is the first thing you white-label, and it is the first thing most resellers forget. A beginner reads that message as the product. If it arrives with a login URL they do not recognise, a server hostname instead of a brand, or a panel skin that does not match the invoice they just paid, you have taught them on day one that somebody else is really running this.
Then they open cPanel. The grid of icons is the single best thing you can put in front of a beginner, because it teaches itself and because every tutorial on the internet already matches it — but only about six of those icons matter to them: File Manager, Email Accounts, Webmail, Softaculous, Backup and Metrics. Hide or reorder the rest in the package you build, and the first session goes quietly.
The account is live minutes after you create it, and free SSL is issued as soon as the domain points at it. Neither of those is worth mentioning to a beginner in advance — they are only worth mentioning after the fact, when the padlock is already there and nobody had to ask for it.
What one beginner account costs you a month
Take the direct cost first. On a Reseller 1 plan at $14.99/mo you are paying $0.40 per active user on top, so the marginal cost of one more beginner account is forty cents plus whatever slice of the 30 GB of NVMe and 300 GB of bandwidth they occupy — which, for a five-page site with a contact form, is close enough to nothing to ignore.
Now take the real cost. Twenty minutes of your time in a month, at whatever your hour is worth, dwarfs the forty cents by two orders of magnitude. That is the whole economics of reselling to beginners: the cost of goods is trivial and the cost of service is not, so any pricing model that bills for gigabytes rather than for answerability is pointed the wrong way round.
The commonly quoted figure for agency-managed hosting is £15–30 a month bundled with updates and small fixes. That number is not about disk. It is about somebody being answerable when the site is down, and it survives scrutiny precisely because a beginner knows they cannot fix it themselves.
The four tickets that arrive first
Mail on the phone. Almost always the first one, almost always because the client typed the password from the welcome email into an autocorrecting keyboard. Send the IMAP, POP and SMTP settings as a screenshot rather than a paragraph and this ticket halves.
'The domain isn't working yet.' A beginner does not distinguish between registered and delegated, and they will ring you inside the hour. Set expectations in writing before you change anything, because propagation is the one delay in this trade that you genuinely cannot shorten.
'I've lost my website.' Nine times in ten this is a cached page, an old browser tab, or a staging copy they bookmarked. Ask for the exact URL from their address bar before you touch anything on the server.
'Can you just...' The scope creep ticket. Beginners cannot tell the difference between hosting and web design, so write the boundary into your care plan on day one rather than negotiating it at month four when goodwill is doing all the work.
What changes at forty of these accounts
One beginner is a conversation. Forty is a process, and the things that break first are the ones you did by hand: individually written welcome emails, passwords set at the keyboard, DNS you edited from memory, and a support inbox with no canned replies in it. Build the package once in WHM, name it something the client would recognise, and create every account from it.
Watch the disk before you watch anything else. Reseller 1 gives you 30 GB across 100 possible accounts, which is generous for brochure sites and tight the moment two clients start storing full-resolution photographs. Overselling is switched on from the start, which is a tool rather than a licence — it lets you sell realistically, not infinitely.
The upgrade is a line change on your account rather than a migration, so growing from Reseller 1 to Reseller 2 at $29.99/mo, or on to Reseller 3 at $59.99/mo, does not mean a weekend of moving client sites. Plan the step before you need it, because the month you actually need it will be a busy one for other reasons.
What you can put your own name on
Private nameservers run under your brand, the packages carry names you chose, and the client's cPanel is the client's cPanel. Nothing in the account they use every day points anywhere except at you — which is the entire proposition when the person paying has no idea how hosting works.
Mailboxes on the client's own domain are part of the plan rather than an add-on you have to explain, which removes the most common awkward line from a first invoice.
- Private nameservers under your own brand
- Packages you build, name and price yourself
- Per-account limits, so one client is never everybody's problem
- A tidy exit for any client who leaves
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
The client never sees past you
White labelling runs from the nameservers to the panel, so a non-technical client has no reason to learn who your supplier is.
Forty cents per active user
Reseller plans add $0.40 per active user on top of the plan fee, which makes the marginal cost of one more brochure site trivially small.
Free SSL on every account you create
Certificates are issued and reissued without anybody diarising them, which removes the single most embarrassing beginner-facing failure.
Limits you set, per account
You decide what each package gets, so a client who leaves a plugin looping is one client's afternoon rather than your whole book.
A company your clients can look up
IGI Security Services Ltd, registered in England and Wales — useful when a cautious client asks who is actually behind the platform.
Cover behind your desk
Real people answer around the clock, for you and for them, which is what lets a one-person agency advertise support it can genuinely honour.
Price Tags Compared
How we compare with the household names
Typical sign-up and renewal prices across the market, set next to ours — the second number most comparison charts leave off.
| Line item | Hosting SellerBest seller | Typical big-brand host | Typical budget host | Typical loss-leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Price at renewal / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Renewal price on the entry plan is unchanged | ||||
| SSL on every plan | ||||
| Site migration included | ||||
| The entry plan uses NVMe storage | ||||
| Entry plan gets a backup daily | ||||
| Live human support, 24/7 |
*The number in our column is the cheapest plan on our shelf, priced on an annual term and pulled live from the very catalogue that feeds the pricing page, so it cannot drift out of date. Other columns show the ranges shared hosting tends to advertise inside each bracket: introductory rates that normally ask for a one-to-four-year commitment, then climb once that term expires. Naming individual competitors and printing their prices is something we have stopped doing. A figure we cannot re-check on the day you read it has no business sitting in front of you. So compare us with whoever you are genuinely weighing up, and read the renewal line first. That line tells you more than the headline ever will.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Build the beginner package once
Set the disk, the mailbox count and the visible feature list in WHM, give it a name your client would recognise, and never create a beginner account any other way.
- 2
Write the welcome email before the first sale
Your branding, your login URL, screenshots for mail setup, and one sentence about what is and is not included — this document prevents more tickets than any technical decision on this page.
- 3
Price the answerability, not the storage
Decide what an hour of your time costs, estimate twenty minutes a month per beginner, and set the retail figure from that rather than from the shelf price underneath it.
- 4
Test the exit before you need it
Create a throwaway account, take a full cPanel backup, and confirm it restores cleanly elsewhere — a tidy handover is a reputation asset in a small industry.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- A separate cPanel account per client, never a shared one
- Private nameservers pointed at your own brand
- A welcome email that carries your logo and your login URL
- Free SSL issued automatically on every account you create
- Daily backups across every client account
- Imunify360 on guard on every client site
- Per-package limits set before the first account is made
- Softaculous available in every account you hand over
- cPanel, so the tutorials your client finds actually match
- A written scope for what your care plan does not cover
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
Which shelf should a beginner client actually go on?
For a brochure site, the smallest one. Launch carries 10 GB, one website, 500 GB of bandwidth and 25 MySQL databases at $2.42/mo, and that is more than a five-page site consumes in a year. If the client is yours and billed through your own reseller account, the equivalent package you build in WHM matters more than the shelf name — set the limits to something you can honestly support and leave headroom you can grant later as a favour.
Should I resell hosting to a beginner at all, or send them direct?
Send them direct if you do not want the phone call. The moment you take a margin you have taken the answerability, and beginners generate the highest ticket volume per pound of revenue of any client type you will carry. The counter-argument is retention: a client whose hosting you hold is famously slow to go anywhere else, and that is worth more than the margin itself.
What do I tell a client who asks who owns the servers?
Tell them the truth in the form that answers their real question: the platform is operated by IGI Security Services Ltd, registered in England and Wales, and you are their point of contact for everything on it. Beginners ask this because they want to know somebody real exists, not because they want a supply chain diagram.
How much support time should I budget per beginner account?
Assume twenty minutes a month in the first quarter and under ten thereafter, weighted heavily towards mail and DNS. Two clients in ten will need considerably more, so price the average rather than the median and keep a written boundary around design work — that is the item that quietly turns a profitable account into a loss-making one.
What happens to the account if the client leaves me?
It moves out cleanly, because it was a separate cPanel account from the first day. Take a full backup from the panel, hand it over, and let the new provider restore it onto any cPanel host anywhere. The domain stays registered in the client's name and can transfer once the registry's usual 60-day lock has passed.
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Put your own name on the counter.
WHM at the top, a cPanel of their own for every client, and private nameservers on your brand — from $14.99/mo plus $0.40 per active user.
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