Setup Your Cloud Hosting Reseller Account In 10 Easy Steps

We make it extremely easy to get your cloud web hosting business online.

Step 1: Select Your Plan

The main difference between these packages is the amount of disk space and bandwidth allowed.  You’re allowed to “oversell” to your clients as long as your overall account stays within its limitations.  That way, you’re able to use our Startup package to get going and then scale up as your growth calls for it! The Corporate package comes with a free SSL certificate that you can use on any domain as well as a dedicated IP address.  All packages have SSD drives with Raid 10, Cloudflare w/Railgun, and Web Host Manager w/cPanel!

Step 2: Enter Your Domain Name

This is going to be the main domain name on your Cloud Reseller Hosting account.  This will most likely be the name of your web hosting site.  You can register a new name, transfer your current domain from another registrar, or use an existing domain and update your nameservers manually.  To make things very simple on yourself, we highly recommend having your domain on our platform.  This way when we go to setup DNS records, it’s all in one place.

Step 3: Complete Your Payment

If you’re a new Name Hero Cloud Reseller, we’d like to welcome you with a special discount on your first month!  We love getting new business and want to help you by offering some savings!  It is also our pleasure to accept all major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex) as well as Bitcoin and PayPal.  Over the last couple of months we’ve seen the number of Bitcoin payments (especially for domains) sore!  We love cryptocurrency so we’re glad to see you all using it.

If you’re paying by Credit Card you’ll enter your information on this page.  If you’re paying with Bitcoin or PayPal you’ll make your payment on the next screen.  Go ahead and complete the other fields.

Step 4: Register Your Name Servers

By default, we’re going to setup ns1.YOURDOMAIN.com and ns2.YOURDOMAIN.com to your account.  However, you will need to register these with the corresponding IP addresses.  By default you’re going to use ns1.YOURDOMAIN.com with the IP address 69.16.210.143 and ns2.YOURDOMAIN.com with the IP address 72.52.169.172.  If you’re using our platform, you can watch a video on how to register your name servers or view the detailed documentation.

If you ordered the Corporate package or have more than one dedicated IP address, you can use those as your name server IPs.  If you have any questions on this, please feel free to let us know and we’ll help you out.

Step 5: Setup Your DNS Records

Next, it’s important to setup all of your DNS records to ensure everything is routing properly.  There are a couple of different options when using NameHero:

• Use The Default DNS – The default DNS system is going to be controlled inside of Web Host Manager.  This is the easiest because everything is automatically setup for you when you create domains.  As long as you have registered your name servers in the step above, you’ll be able to use NS1.YOURDOMAIN.COM and NS2.YOURDOMAIN.COM as your name servers.  Please allow a couple hours for things to propagate.  Additionally, you can also use NS1.NAMEHERO.NET and NS2.NAMEHERO.NET while your custom nameservers propagate.
• Use Our Managed DNS Service – You can have us host your DNS for you on our remote servers for $0.98 per domain.  Some customers like this route because they don’t want to order hosting for the domain – just simply point it to another site.  Other customers like it because it provides an extra level of redundancy.  Either way, you can manage your DNS by navigating to the domain name in our system and clicking on “Manage” under DNS Host Record Management:

From there, you should setup your records to look something like this:

The first line is simply an astrick.  This is a wildcard for anything @ yourdomain.com.  It will point to that IP address.  Make sure this IP address matches the one in your welcome email.

The second two lines are defining which server the nameserver records live on.  These will most likely be the above IPs unless you have a dedicated IP on your account.  Any questions regarding this, feel free to ask us and we’ll help you out.

You can also read more documentation on how to manage your DNS at Name Hero.

Step 6: Access Web Host Manager

Web Host Manager is your command center.  This is where you will setup new domains, access an account’s cPanel, and carry out any other function for your clients.  You can access this directly through the Web Host Manager link sent in our welcome email or by logging into the Name Hero platform, Clicking on My Services, clicking on your Reseller Package, and then clicking the blue Login to WHM button:

Step 7: Access Initial Website cPanel

While inside of Web Host Manager you can scroll down to List Accounts under Account Information and you will find a list of all domains hosted on your Cloud Reseller Account.  If this is your first time in WHM, you will only see the domain name you signed up with.  You can click the cPanel link here and access the control panel for that site.  Inside of cPanel you can then setup your email, upload files, install software such as WHMCS, etc.

You can also manage Cloudflare railguns for each domain inside of cPanel.  Check out the blog post with a video tutorial.

Step 8: Setup Hosting Packages

Before you can start setting up domains in Web Host Manager you first have to setup your packages.  This is basically the limits that you’re allowing your customers.  To get started, scroll down to Add a Package under Packages inside of Web Host Manager:

You can then create the limits for each of the accounts you want to sell.  It’s important to note that we allow you to “oversell” to your clients as long as you stay within your account limitations.  So this basically means, you can have a package that offers “Unlimited” web space and bandwidth to a client as long as you don’t go over the limits of your Reseller account.  Now, if you’re offering Unlimited, you must enter a value such as 999999 in Disk Quota and Bandwidth.  

Some of our clients like to set disk space and bandwidth limitations so they can charge more for the resources.  The average website doesn’t use that much space, so it’s easy to offer a “starter” package and then scale up as your customers need it.  We’ll cover more of this in a future blog post, but you’ll need to setup at least one package to start creating accounts:

Please note we do not currently allow the creation of packages with SSH shell access with our Reseller packages.  If you would like to offer this to your customers, you’ll need to purchase a VPS, SSD, or dedicated cloud solution. If you would like to offer your customers a dedicated IP address, you would need to make sure you have them added to your main reseller account.

Step 9: Add Your First Customer’s Domain

After you create your first package, you’re then ready to start adding customers to your account.  Perhaps you have another one of your own domains that needs hosting.  This is a great time to add it.  Simply navigate to Create A New Account under Account Functions in Web Host Manager:

Most of the options are very straight forward and if they’re not you can just leave them default.  The only things you need to enter is Domain, Username, Password, and select a package.  Once you click on create, you can then update that customer’s name servers to the ones you setup earlier.  Their site will then begin resolving in a couple of hours after it has propagated.  You can follow the same steps as above to access that client’s cPanel.

Step 10: How To Check Your Resource Usage

You’re now ready to start hosting all your clients and/or internal websites!  Everything is setup and ready to rock and roll!

It’s important you keep check on your resource limitations so you can make sure you’re scaling with your growth.  To do this you simply go into Web Host Manager like you’re going to create a new account.  Scroll down and you can see the limits:

As I continue my Web Hosting 101 series, I’ll get into other important factors to running your business such as how to automate this with WHMCS, setup SSL certificates, and more! So stay tuned to the blog for much more, but also feel free to reach out to our Superhero Support team if you have any questions or comments.

Ryan Gray

Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.