Wholesale desk — design studios
Web hosting for web designers — Selling hosting to someone who resells it too
A design studio is not buying a website account, it is buying the layer underneath its own client relationships, so every decision you make about branding and access lands twice.
Straight answer first
Selling hosting to a design studio is wholesale, not retail: they will resell it, so what they are really buying is margin, predictability and the certainty that their client never meets you by accident. That means private nameservers, packages named their way, and a support path that comes through them rather than around them.
In practice a studio wants one WHM with room to grow. Reseller 1 gives 30 GB, 300 GB of transfer and 100 accounts at $14.99 a month plus $0.40 per active user; Reseller 2 doubles the storage and transfer for $29.99; Reseller 3 carries 100 GB, 1.5 TB and 500 accounts at $59.99. Setup is free, overselling is on from the start, and each of their clients gets a cPanel of its own.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 24 August 2026
99.9%
Uptime target under the portfolio
24/7
Cover for the studio, not its client
Free
SSL on every site the studio puts up
NVMe
Storage beneath a wholesale shelf
Designers working freelance and studios of two or three make good hosting clients for one reason: they already understand that recurring revenue beats project revenue, and they have watched enough finished builds walk off to somebody else's cheap host to want the layer underneath in their own hands.
What they are wary of is exposure. A studio that puts its name on hosting is putting its reputation on somebody else's uptime, and the fear is a client discovering the chain during an outage. Address that directly and you win the account.
The second thing they need is a migration path, because a studio arriving with fifteen existing sites is not buying a fresh shelf — it is buying an afternoon of moving that they have been dreading for two years.
Your client resells too, so price the wholesale layer
A studio charges its clients a monthly figure for hosting and care, and your price has to leave room inside it. That is the whole negotiation. Reseller 1 at $14.99 a month covers 30 GB across up to 100 accounts, so a studio hosting fifteen client sites is paying pennies per site at wholesale before the active-user charge — which is what makes their own retail figure defensible rather than cheeky.
Overselling being switched on from the start matters more here than in any other vertical. A studio allocates generous-looking quotas to reassure clients, while actual consumption stays a fraction of the allocation. Selling against real usage is what lets them advertise headroom they will never be asked for.
Whose brand appears where
Three surfaces decide whether the arrangement feels like the studio's own: the nameservers the domain is delegated to, the panel their client logs into, and the name on the invoice. Private nameservers under the studio's brand handle the first. cPanel accounts created from their own packages, named their way, handle the second. Their billing handles the third — and if they want to run that properly, a WHMCS licence is $6.99 a month.
Be honest about the edges. The panel is cPanel and it says so, the platform is supplied by Hosting Seller, a trading name of IGI Security Services Ltd registered in England and Wales, and a client who digs will find that out. What you can promise is that nothing in the ordinary run of the relationship surfaces it: no supplier branding in front of their customer, no support reply arriving from a name their client has never heard.
Migration season: absorbing a back catalogue
The studio's existing sites are scattered across whatever hosts their clients happened to buy, which means the migration is not one job but fifteen small ones with fifteen different sets of credentials. Do them in batches, oldest and least trafficked first, and keep each one on its old host until the new copy has been checked at the domain level rather than on a temporary address.
The practical traps are always the same: mail moved without warning so a client loses a fortnight of messages, hard-coded absolute paths in an old theme, a database user whose password lives in a file nobody opened since 2019, and a domain whose registrar login the client has forgotten. Migration is included at no charge on our side, which pays for itself here purely by removing the argument about who does the work.
The commercials of a wholesale shelf
Encourage the studio to price hosting as care rather than capacity, because that is what they can defend at renewal. Updates applied, backups proven, certificates handled, a named response time. The gigabytes are irrelevant to their client and impossible to justify a mark-up on.
Then agree the escalation route in advance: their client raises a ticket with them, they raise it with us, and the answer comes back through them. Our desk answers at any hour for you and for them, and the reseller refund window is seven days against thirty on hosting plans, so a studio trying the arrangement out knows exactly where it stands.
What a studio actually gets on this shelf
WHM for the studio, a separate cPanel for each of their clients, packages they build and name themselves, and private nameservers so delegation reads as their own infrastructure.
Underneath it, NVMe storage with LiteSpeed caching, Imunify360 on every client site, daily backups across every account and Softaculous in each one for the builds that start with WordPress.
- Private nameservers under the studio's own brand
- Packages the studio defines, priced however they like
- Free migration for the whole back catalogue
- Support that answers the studio, never their client
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Wholesale room in the price
30 GB across up to 100 accounts at $14.99 a month leaves a defensible retail figure for a studio hosting a dozen client sites.
Overselling from day one
Allocate generous quotas to reassure clients while billing against real usage, which is how a small shelf serves a long list.
Delegation that reads as theirs
Private nameservers on the studio's own brand, so a client checking where the site lives sees the studio and nothing else.
The back catalogue moved free
Site migration is included, which turns fifteen dreaded jobs into a scheduled batch rather than a quote nobody accepts.
Billing they can run themselves
A WHMCS licence at $6.99 a month turns invoicing, renewals and provisioning into something that runs without the studio in the loop.
An escalation path with one door
Their client asks them, they ask us, at any hour — so nobody downstream ever meets a name they were not introduced to.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Count the sites, then buy one tier up
Fifteen client sites fit easily in 30 GB, but studios grow in lumps when a client brings a portfolio. Reseller 2 at $29.99 for 60 GB and 250 accounts is the tier most studios settle on within a year.
- 2
Set up private nameservers first
Do it before the first migration, not after. Every site you move afterwards is delegated to the studio's own nameservers from the start, so nothing has to be re-pointed later.
- 3
Define the packages the studio will sell
Two or three tiers, named for the client rather than the spec, with disk, mail and database limits fixed. Consistency is what makes the fiftieth account as quick as the first.
- 4
Migrate in batches and check at the domain
Oldest and quietest first, mail before web, and no cutover confirmed on a temporary address. Keep the old host paid for a fortnight after each batch.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- WHM for the studio, a private cPanel for each of their clients
- Private nameservers running under the studio's own brand
- Two or three packages defined once and reused every time
- Overselling enabled so allocation is not consumption
- Free migration used for the entire existing back catalogue
- Mail moved and verified before any web cutover
- Free SSL on every domain in the studio's portfolio, reissued for them
- Daily backups across every account, restorable from WHM
- Imunify360 scanning every site in the studio's portfolio
- A WHMCS licence at $6.99 a month if billing is to run itself
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
How much can a studio sensibly charge its own clients for hosting?
Enough that care is funded rather than resented. The wholesale side is straightforward — 30 GB across up to 100 accounts at $14.99 a month plus $0.40 per active user — so the retail figure is set by what the studio promises: updates applied, backups proven, certificates handled and a response time. Price the promise, because that is the part a client can feel and the part they will pay to keep.
Will the studio's client ever see who supplies the platform?
Not in the ordinary run of the relationship. Delegation points at private nameservers on the studio's own brand, accounts are created from packages the studio named, and support comes back through them. What we will not do is pretend the chain does not exist: the panel is cPanel, the platform is supplied by Hosting Seller, a trading name of IGI Security Services Ltd, and a determined client who looks will find it. Every honest white-label arrangement works this way.
Can a studio create sub-resellers for the freelancers it subcontracts to?
Inside one WHM, a studio creates cPanel accounts rather than further reseller accounts, so a subcontractor gets a normal account with limits the studio sets. If a freelancer genuinely needs to resell in their own right, they take their own shelf — Reseller 1 at $14.99 a month — and the studio stops carrying their support. That is usually the cleaner arrangement anyway.
What happens to a client site if the studio and the client part company?
Take a full backup of that one cPanel account, hand it over, and remove the account from the shelf. Because every client sits in an isolated account, nothing else is touched and no other client's data is anywhere near the export. Decide in advance who owns the domain, though — that is the argument that actually happens, and it is settled at the registrar rather than in the panel.
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