Reseller Guide. Setting up your Reseller Account in Website Panel

Transcription

1 Reseller Guide Setting up your Reseller Account in Website Panel Guide Contents Introduction...2 Assumptions...2 Logging in...2 Hitting the Ground Running...3 Mail Templates...4 Policies...4 Setting Up Your Reseller Account...5 A Word about Overselling...5 Final Account Configuration...5 Name Servers...6 Instant Alias...6 Global DNS Records...7 Hosting Space Menu...7 Creating Hosting Plans...7 Setting up your clients...9 Integration with WHMCS...9 Adding a Website Panel (WSP) server...10 Setting up a Website Panel Package...10 Using Website Panel E-commerce...11 Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 1 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011

2 Introduction Thank you for choosing Reseller hosting through Cyber Host Pro allowing you to 100% brand your service to your own company. Our reseller hosting plans allow you to create and sell your own plans, ideal for all kinds of users from developers to website hosting providers. Superb premium features and an incredibly fast network allow you to become your own web host while Cyber Host Pro takes care of servers, network and monitoring. Reseller hosting with Cyber Host Pro includes all the features you need to become a hosting company yourself, and all reseller account control panels are tailored to your business needs and allow customisation for your specific requirements. In this guide, we will walk you though setting up your reseller account and branding, which will serve two different purposes, firstly to make sure you haven't missed anything and probably more importantly, finding your way around your control panel and seeing how your reseller account works. Assumptions This guide assumes the following: 1. That you have signed up and paid for your Reseller Hosting account, and have received your Welcome Pack message, received shortly after the Order Confirmation message. 2. That you have either purchased a domain during signup or already have an existing domain, and that the domain is correctly pointing to our nameservers and has completed propagation. 3. Your WebsitePanel login is resellerlogin and your resellerdomain is resellerdomain.com, which is registered via Cyber Host Pro. 4. That you are going to use either the basic built-in ecommerce function to intergrate with your website or that you are integrating with WHMCS (both covered in this guide) Logging in Website Panel is the control panel used for all Windows 2008 Reseller plans at Cyber Host Pro. Not only is this the control panel for the you, the reseller, but it is also the control panel that will be used by your clients to Illustration 1: Login Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 2 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011

3 access and manage their website settings. Visit to login to your reseller account using the username and password in your welcome pack. (you can replace dnpserver.com with your own domain once propagation is complete (view Assumptions, Point 2) Hitting the Ground Running The first thing you will want to do as soon as you login to your control panel is get dived in setting things up, like your plans, your s and your website. Let's work out a plan of action and think about what our ideal end result is have a quick tour of the control panel, including those important places and familiarise yourself with the layout of the control panel before you start. As a Reseller Hosting customer, you have extra responsibility and tasks to perform before you can sell your own plans. It's important to know where these extra tasks are performed and also what limits are already in place and what you can change. Let's have a look at the first screen you will see, where we have highlighted 4 important areas: Illustration 2: First Screen After Login 1) WebsitePanel: This is the logo for the control panel and can be replaced with your own company logo to help with branding. Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 3 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011

4 2) Account Menu: This is where you interact with your account, such as creating hosting plans, adding customers, adding peers (secondary admin accounts) and setting up Ecommerce, giving you the basic tools needed to sell directly through your website. 3) Hosting Spaces: This is your Cyber Host Pro package. It is possible to have more than one Hosting Space and it is also possible to upgrade or downgrade existing plan if needed. 4) Settings: Very important section. This is where you can brand the system to your own requirements, set up s, set your default page, allow or deny resources etc The first area will are going to look at is Settings. Please click on Mail Templates. Mail Templates You will see a list of Mail Templates. Only the top three are important to your Reseller Account: User Account Summary Letter (Customer Added) Hosting Space Summary Letter (Space Added) Password Reminder Letter The importance of the above Mail templates depends on how you will be billing and managing your clients. If you are going to be using a third-party tool, such as WHMCS (recommended) these messages are ignored. If you planning on using the WebsitePanel built-in Ecommerce system, you will need to amend these s to match your organisation. Click Cancel and then click on Policies (underneath Mail Templates). Policies In Policies you will see a rather daunting list of Policy areas, including: WebsitePanel Policy WEB Policy FTP Policy MAIL Policy MS SQL Policy MySQL Policy Policies are an advanced part of your account and should not be changed without due care and attention. They are there for a reason and are pre-configured when you get your account. Policies manage many things, including password and username rules. The policy for MS SQL passwords in WebsitePanel will be the same as the policy within MS SQL Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 4 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011

5 itself. A general rule of thumb for policies is to leave allow unless instructed by support. Click Cancel to go back to your homepage and click on your hosting space. Setting Up Your Reseller Account A Word about Overselling Quite simply, Website Panel does NOT allow overselling. Why is the statement in bold? Because it's important and here is why. Overselling basically allows you to sell more resources than you have available. For instance, if you have 100GB space and 1000GB bandwidth, you can sell 150 accounts, each with 1GB space and 10GB data transfer on the assumption that it is unlikely that your users will ever use all resources. Website Panel works differently that this. If you reseller account has 100GB and you create a user with 2GB of space, that user will have 2GB of space, and you will have 98GB remaining to allocate. Once it is all allocated, you will need to upgrade your plan or increase available space. The ability to not oversell is not a restriction placed by Cyber Host Pro. In fact, overselling is available on our Linux shared hosting and reseller hosting platforms, as well as on our legacy Windows 2003 hosting platforms. Overselling with Windows 2008 is only not available as Website Panel does not allow it. Final Account Configuration Ok, we are nearly ready to start creating our hosting plans, creating accounts for existing clients and selling to new clients, but we do that, it's worth taking a bit of time and thinking about branding. Reseller accounts are provided by us unbranded by default. This means that the name servers we provide, such as ns1.dnpserver.com and ns2.dnpserver.com are not branded to the Cyber Host Pro name. We also automatically set it each domain so that you can access mail through mail.resellerdomain.com or ftp via ftp.resellerdomain.com, and clients can use their own domain names once they have been propagated. As with all things automatic, it's nice to have some control of them. On Windows 2008 Reseller hosting we use the domain dnpserver.com for pretty such everything, but there are additional things you can change to make your account look even more professional. Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 5 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011

6 Illustration 3: Space Home Screen In Illustration 3 section 2 you will see a number of options. We are only interested in the Name Servers, Instant Alias and Global DNS Records in this guide, so click on each one and make any changes you may require. A brief explanation of these three options will now be given. You can of course change these or leave them to the unbranded ones we provide. Name Servers Tutorial: Private Name Servers are when you create your own name servers in which to replace the ones provided by us to brand for your business. Once updated, Website Panel will give these to your clients rather than our own unbranded nameservers. Instant Alias When you or a client adds a website, you get the option to create an instant alias. Instant Aliases are simply a pre-propagation method of accessing your website while waiting for propagation to take place. When you add a domain an instant alias is automatically created for our domain of resellerdomain.com.dnpserver.com. Once propogation has completed, you can change this to resellerdomain.com instead of dnpserver.com. So for clients with the domain mysite.co.uk, the instant alias would be mysite.co.uk.resellerdomain.com. Again, Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 6 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011

7 removing our unbranded server. Global DNS Records Global DNS Records (or Space DNS Records) are any A, MX, TXT, NS or CNAME records specific to your service. By default all the DNS records needed for Cyber Host Pro hosting, such as ftp, mail and webmail A records (ftp.resellerdomain.com etc) are created automatically. However, you may have other servers or external services you need linking in. Any DNS Records added here will be included in all future domains you add under this account. Any existing domains on your account will need manual changing. Hosting Space Menu In Illustration 3 section 1 you will see a number of options like Domains, Websites, Ftp Accounts, Mail, Databases, Scheduled Tasks etc. Your account domain resellerdomain.com will already be added and here is where you configure your own domain and website and services. As a reseller from here you will also see your clients accounts, domains, websites, addresses and Databases once they are added. Creating Hosting Plans Tutorial: Finally, we are ready to create our first hosting plan. For the purpose of this guide we are only going to create one plan, but this can process can be repeated as many times are needed. We are going to give them the catchy names of Hosting Plan and Reseller Plan. Make sure you are on the correct screen by clicking on Account Home on the top menu. We are going to create a small plan called the Hosting Plan with 100Mb of diskspace and 30Gb monthly bandwidth and a few other things. Step 1: Click on Hosting Spaces and then Create Hosting Plan. Step 2: Enter the Plan Name Hosting Plan and a Plan Description and set your Plan Target to the Hosting Space you wish to use. Normally you will just have 1 space listed, but it is possible to have multiple spaces under the same account should you need to expand. Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 7 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011

8 Step 3: Click the System tickbox and then a number of options will appear. Set the options as follows: Disk space, MB: 100 Bandwidth, MB: Domains: 1 Sub-Domains: Unlimited Domain Aliases: Unlimited File Manager: Enabled Illustration 4: Naming your Plan Leave everything else as it is, but have a little look at what is there as options. The result should look like this: Illustration 5: System settings for Hosting Plan Step 4: Click the Web tickbox and set the number of websites to unlimited and also tick the ASP, ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET 4.0 and PHP 5.x tickboxes. Take time to familiarise yourself with the other options here as you may need them for real. Step 5: Click the FTP tickbox and set that to unlimited Step 6: Click the Mail tickbox and set your required mail options. Mail accounts are full addresses, POP3/IMAP/SMTP with webmail. A copy can be forwarded to another address. Mail Forwarders literally just forward to a different address. An example of this is if Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 8 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011

9 you have a commonly wrongly spelt name like Osborne. Your address would be lynne@resellerdomain.com and you would have mail forwarders lyn@, lin@, lynn@ all forwarding to your correct address. Mail Groups are distribution groups, multi-recipient addresses. Step 7: Click the MySQL5 tickbox and tick all the options, and put 500 in the database size field. Step 8: Click Save. Your plan has now been created. Setting up your clients Now you have a Hosting Plan, you can create clients by Clicking on Account Home and the clicking on Customers on the left and the Create User. Once the client has been successfully created, you can create a hosting space for that client by adding the Hosting Plan. Once the hosting space is created, the client can FTP their site up while waiting for propagation to complete, and also test it using an instant alias if required. For Instant Alias to work, DNS must be enabled for the domain. (configurable during creation and also by clicking Domains and then click on the domain in question). Integration with WHMCS WHMCS is an all-in-one client management, billing & support solution for online businesses. WHMCS handles everything from signup to termination, with automated billing, provisioning & management. With WHMCS, you're in control with a very powerful business automation tool. It fully integrates with Website Panel, so if you have an existing installation of WHMCS you can easily integrate it. WHMCS is available on a monthly basis and the cheapest place we have found so far to purchase it is via If you don't already have a Linux plan somewhere, you may also wish to consider a bronze linux package for 30 a year specifically to run WHMCS should you have any issues installing it on Windows. For more information, please read the knowledgebase article here: Cyber Host Pro WHMCS Settings for Website Panel This is not a guide for WHMCS, so for the benefit of this guide we will assume that WHMCS is setup and running and you have tailored it to your requirements. Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 9 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011

10 Adding a Website Panel (WSP) server 1. Begin by going to Setup > Servers 2. Click Add New Server 3. In the server details box, select the server type "WebsitePanel" from the dropdown menu. 4. Enter the IP/Hostname of your Enterprise server install 5. Enter the username and password for the account that has permissions to create your users. The account has to be a reseller account with permissions to create packages under the top level hosting space your customers will be created under. Setting up a Website Panel Package To create a DotNetPanel package: 1. Go to Setup > Products/Services 2. Click Create new product 3. Select "Shared Hosting Account" from the Product Type drop down list 4. Enter a name and select a product group if relevant and click next 5. Select the "Module settings" tab 6. In the Module Name drop down list, select WebsitePanel There are several settings here that must be set in order for the module to function correctly 1. Package Name - The name you give the package, this will also be the hosting space name in WSP 2. PlanID - This is the WSP plan ID, this can be found by looking in the query string in WSP when editing the plan. It shows in the address bar something like and in that case the Plan ID would be 5 that you need to enter into WHMCS. 3. Parent SpaceId - Space ID that all packages will be created under, e.g. 1 for serveradmin etc, Again, can be got from the query string in WSP 4. Enterprise Server Port - The port to connect to ES with, default is This is set when you install WSP and can be configured using the WSP configuration utility. The optional settings that can be set are: 1. Different Portal URL - Tick this if your panel portal is on a different hostname to Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 10 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011

11 ES. If ticked, set the full URL in the "Portal URL" text box 2. Send WSP Account Summary - If ticked, WSP will send out an when the account is created as defined in the reseller policies. 3. Send WSP Hosting Space Summary - If ticked wills end hour a summary of the Hosting plan when created as defined in the reseller policies. 4. Create Mail account - If ticked a default mail account will be created as defined in the reseller mail policy 5. Create FTP account - If ticked a FTP account will be created with the same username and password as the WSP account, however will be prefixed/suffixed as per your reseller account FTP account policies 6. Temporary domain - If ticked and enabled in WSP policies, a temporary domain will be created 7. HTML - If ticked user in WSP will be sent HTML from WSP (for bandwidth usage, password reminders etc) 8. Create Website - If ticked a website for the domain will be created under the hosting space Using Website Panel E-commerce Website Panel E-commerce is not recommended, but if you need a very basic way to sell your services it is possible to do this with the built-in system. For details information on how to use this feature, please visit the following link: Here you will find detailed information from start to finish how to use this feature. Reseller Guide: WebsitePanel 11 Cyber Host Pro Ltd 2011