Modwest Reselling: How it works

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Reseller Defined

As a reseller, you are a customer of Modwest who resells hosting services to your own hosting customers. By bundling branded hosting with your other services, you can add a recurring revenue stream and maintain a single source status with your customers.

Reseller Plans

Each reseller plan includes disk storage, data transfer (bandwidth), and a given number of hosting accounts (sites) you can sell. For Modwest billing purposes, storage and data transfer measurements for all accounts are added together and compared to the aggregate limit associated with your reseller plan. In other words, Modwest is not concerned with the resources used by any one of your individual customers -- just the total usage across all your customers.

See current reselling plans.

Supporting your Customers

As with our other hosting services, we are committed to giving you the best experience possible.

The Modwest Reseller system is designed to be a private label service, meaning we will have no direct relationship or communication with your customers. You are free to support your customers in any way you see fit, and you can search the Modwest FAQ & Knowledge Base at www.modwest.com/help for answers. If you are unable to ascertain the answer to one of your customer's questions, and it is specific to Modwest hosting technologies, then we will be happy to assist you via e-mail, or our toll-free phone number.

Customer Billing

Our system is simple: We bill you for reseller hosting service at a fixed monthly fee. You may bill your customers (or not!) and accept payments in whichever manner works best for you. Unlike affiliate programs, referral programs, and some other reseller plans, we do not play any role between you and your customers.

You may wish to use software such as Quickbooks, a third-party site such as PayPal, or a web-based billing system to bill and track your customer payments.

Reseller Tools

You will be provided with a reseller-enhanced version of Modwest OnSite (my.modwest.com) to manage your hosting service. You will be able to set custom logo, style and color information for the branded control panel (also powered by OnSite) that your customers will use to administer their accounts. This feature allows you to integrate the look and feel of your website and marketing materials into the control panel. You can also create and edit customer records, add sites to customer records, and search your customers by multiple parameters. The first customer you create will likely be your own company, and your website will belong to this customer.

Private Label Hosting

From your customers' standpoint, you (and only you) will be the hosting service provider. Where it is reasonably feasible to do so, we hide any mention of Modwest, allowing you to brand your control panel with logos, colors, and custom text.

Plans for your Customers

You can invent plans with whatever resource limits, pricing, and billing period you desire. You can even create hidden plans that are not displayed to your customers on the account upgrade page, but are available to you to assign to specific customer accounts.

Overselling

You are free to "oversell" the resources associated with your reseller plan. Overselling is the practice of offering more total disk and bandwidth to your customers than is actually provided to you as a reseller. Since most customers use a very small portion of their plan's resource capacity, overselling is common in web hosting. Of course, your customers' resource requirements may be dissimilar from the average customers', so we advise that you oversell conservatively.

For example, your reseller plan may include one gigabyte of disk space and allow for 25 sites. You can still offer each of your customers 100MB disk space (2.5GB total) or more, if you are confident that the total usage from all your customers won't exceed your plan's 1GB allowance.

SSL Options

You have two options for offering SSL to your customers. There is a monthly fee for each secure certificate associated with your account and your customers' accounts. See Current pricing...

1. A shared certificate creates URLs like this: https://secure.resellerdomain.com/customersite.com
   For this option, you will need to purchase your own certificate that will be used solely for this purpose. Once the certificate is installed, just let us know which of your customers should have the service. Note that even though the URL is at your domain, the PHP configuration (via php.ini) is that of your customer's account.
2. A dedicated certificate creates a URL such as https://secure.customersite.com and requires a similar setup process.
   

DNS

There are several options for your DNS configurations. We recommend that you list these Modwest nameservers on your domain as well as all your customer domain registrations:

ns1.secure-nameserver.com
ns2.secure-nameserver.com

This allows Modwest to provide complete DNS services for you and ensures continuous availability in the event of Modwest network configuration changes.

Alternately, if your registrar allows it, you may also register your own nameservers (e.g., ns1.resellerdomain.com) pointing at Modwest IP addresses. Modwest nameserver IP addresses are documented in the FAQ.