What You Resell
CMS: What You Are Really Supporting, Whatever the Plan Says
Your clients think they are paying for hosting and they are ringing you about an editing screen.
Straight answer first
A CMS is software that lets people write and manage the contents of a website through an editing screen rather than through code — and for a reseller it is the thing your clients will describe as 'the hosting' every time they ring.
It keeps the words apart from the wrapping. Writers work in an editor; themes and templates decide how the result looks. WordPress leads by a wide margin, with Joomla and Drupal holding on where the content model is unusually structured.
Which one your clients run decides your ticket mix, your ability to hire, and how many separate sets of documentation you are quietly maintaining.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 4 August 2026
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Terms we leave you to guess
100+
Entries, cross-referenced
Real
Examples from live client work
Free
No gate on any entry
Choosing between platforms is mostly a question of who edits and how complicated the content is. Permissions, translation handling and custom content types separate them far more sharply than any marketing page manages. None of that is a hosting question, and all of it lands on the hosting desk.
The reseller version of the question is different again: not which CMS is best, but how many of them you are willing to be competent in. Every additional platform on your list is another set of quirks you will be expected to know at short notice.
The login screen is your product, whether you built it or not
Clients do not separate the account from the application. If the editor is confusing, the hosting is confusing. If a page will not save, your platform is broken. That is not unreasonable of them; it is simply what the relationship looks like from their chair.
You can either accept that and price for it, or draw the line explicitly and stick to it. What does not work is drawing the line, never mentioning it, and then being annoyed when a client crosses it.
Three platforms, three ticket profiles
WordPress generates volume: many small questions, most answerable in two lines, from clients who edit their own pages. Joomla arrives with permissions questions from organisations that have several editors. Drupal arrives rarely and, when it does, with a developer already attached who will ask you about PHP versions rather than about buttons.
Knowing which profile you are taking on is worth doing before you quote the account rather than after the first month of it.
What standardising actually saves
Depth. One platform you know thoroughly makes your answers faster, your documentation reusable and your migrations predictable. Four platforms you know a bit make every ticket a research project performed while a client waits.
That is not a reason to refuse an inherited Joomla site, which is perfectly welcome on the accounts you create. It is a reason to decide what you actively sell and market, as opposed to what you will host politely.
What runs on the accounts you create, and what to read next
WordPress, Joomla and Drupal all run on the accounts you open, with one-click installs available through Softaculous and PHP chosen per account so an older application and a current one can sit side by side.
Worth reading next: WordPress, Database, PHP and Theme.
PHP is set per account from the panel, which is what makes a mixed client estate manageable rather than a compromise.
Jargon costs you an hour a week
This is the reseller desk's own vocabulary list. It exists because explaining the same eight words to every new client is unpaid work, and a link is quicker than a paragraph.
Step up a tier whenever the client list demands it — every account you have already built comes along untouched.
- Plain English, from WHM down to the invoice
- Every entry ends on how it behaves at scale
- Where a setting can leak your supplier
- Safe to forward straight to a customer
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Costed per account
Every entry says what the term does to your resource pool and your ticket queue, not merely what the word means.
What the client actually sees
Each definition names the screen, the email or the error a customer meets, so you can answer before they open a ticket.
Judged at forty accounts
Each term is tested against a long client list as well as a short one, because that is where reseller decisions actually bite.
Safe to forward
Written so you can send the link to a customer instead of composing the explanation yourself for the ninth time.
Entries that point onwards
Related terms cross-link, so one lookup turns into a working grasp of the whole account stack rather than a single answer.
CMS, in one read
CMS defined as your real support surface, with the ticket profile of each platform named.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Decide what you sell, not just what you host
Host whatever a client arrives with. Market and support one platform properly, because depth is what makes your answers quick.
- 2
Price the editing-screen questions in
Clients will ask them regardless of what the contract says. Either build the time into the monthly figure or have a rate ready.
- 3
Read the neighbours
WordPress, Database and PHP finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read from here.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge, before it reaches you
- NVMe SSD under the whole platform, LiteSpeed cache in front
- Seven days' money back on reseller, thirty on hosting plans
- A 99.9% uptime target, watched by monitoring day and night
- PHP chosen per account from the panel, one client at a time
- WordPress Toolkit, with updates applied for you
- SSH, Git and Composer on the plans built for developers
- Client accounts moved in by our staff, at no charge
- Staging copies where the plan carries them, so clients sign off first
- Every client account copied daily, with restores you run yourself
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
Should I standardise my clients on one CMS?
Standardise what you market, not what you accept. Selling one platform you know deeply makes your support quick, your documentation reusable and your migrations boring in the best sense. Still take the inherited Joomla site — it runs perfectly well on the accounts you create — but do not build a sales page around a platform you would have to research each time.
A client wants Drupal. Can I host it on a reseller account?
Yes. Drupal, Joomla and WordPress all run on the accounts you open, with one-click installs available and the PHP version chosen per account so an older build and a current one can coexist. The question worth asking is not whether you can host it, but whether you are willing to answer questions about it at four on a Friday.
Who trains the client to use the CMS?
Somebody does, and if you have not decided in advance it will be you, unpaid, in fifteen-minute increments. Either build an onboarding session into your setup fee, point clients at a documented set of instructions you wrote once, or state plainly that training is chargeable. All three work. Silence does not.
How do I stop CMS questions turning into free consultancy?
Answer the first one generously, then send the rate. A short, friendly reply that solves the immediate problem and mentions what ongoing help costs converts far better than a refusal, and it turns a support drain into a retainer. The clients who never wanted to pay stop asking; the ones who value it start paying.
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