What is WHM? A Beginner’s Guide

Updated on 12 November 2024 6 min Read
What is WHM? A Beginner’s Guide

Planning to become a web host reseller? Do you have the right administrative tools? If you don’t, it would be very difficult for you to manage user accounts created by you and your business might get crashed.

Keeping this in mind, you should consider using Web Host Manager (WHM) to make the process easier for you. It is basically a control panel that allows you to access a range of features that make account management as a reseller or host smooth.

In this article, you will learn about what Web Host Manager is, as well as some of its benefits. Let’s get started!

Reasons to Use WHM (Web Host Manager)

Below are the key points why you should use WHM for managing multiple websites:

  • Highly security for sites: When you get a different cPanel for each site, it means even if one domain gets hacked, others won’t be affected. This will make them highly secure.
  • Improved management: You get the ability to monitor all activity on your websites and switch between cPanels easily. Moreover, WHM also allows you to manage the bandwidth and disk space of each account.
  • Resell hosting: Your hosting can be monetized by creating new cPanel accounts that people can purchase.
  • Unique cPanels for branding: In order to resell hosting services, a WHM interface can be changed to reflect your brand.

What Functions can be Performed with WHM?

Below are the major functions that can be performed with WHM:

Create, Delete, or Suspend Accounts

WHM makes it possible to add multiple cPanel accounts and set a default page for each of them.

Additionally, if any of customers violates the agreement or their account gets expired, it is possible to delete or suspend it.

When you provide cPanel accounts to your clients, your reseller business can get a distinct benefit. Ultimately, a management interface is important to automate the website maintenance process for your customers. This may mean that you too will get fewer support requests.

Moreover, it can make server-oriented administration easy for them, such as file organization, and could provide peace of mind as cPanel also has the ability to backup data. Since you will be able to offer these features, it will help you stay competitive against other resellers and web hosts.

If there is no option to take backups, you or your customers might experience considerable delays, too. Broadly, cPanel can make website management easier, and is straightforward as compared to more technically involved alternatives. Also, your client will already know about its usage too.

Additionally, cPanel accounts generated via WHM are fully white-labeled. This means you can use your own your identity, such as your company name and logo, on your clients’ accounts.

Create Your Own Hosting Packages

When you resell hosting services, it’s essential to have multiple price points available so that you can server to different buyers. After all, everyone will have different needs, and each budget will be unique.

Therefore, tiered pricing is such a popular practice in the hosting industry. In comparison to other systems, this method will help you in selling more cPanel hosting plans and generating more profit.

If you offer both expensive as well as cheaper packages, the expensive one will encourage customers to check your cheaper options as those would be affordable. Even the smallest package will force them to check the pricier plan for getting access to more features.

This is the reason for most customers purchasing the middle package. Rather than losing leads to competitors when they think your services are too expensive or lack in features, those can be converted with one of your plans.

There would be price difference in the tiered WHM packages depending on the disk space, monthly bandwidth, access to email accounts, database size or number of supported domains. Moreover, you can modify the offers depending on your brand’s growth for scaling your business.

Monitor the Server

All the server activity can be tracked via WHM. For example, there is a Process Manager that registers all the ongoing process on the server.

The Service Manager allows the owner to manage services as well as their background activities.

At the last, Current Disk Usage will keep you informed about the remaining storage and what the storage used for.

Set Multiple Hosting Packages

Being the WHM account owner, you will get the freedom to decide on the way you will divide the storage. This is helpful while providing different hosting packages at different places.

You will be able to easily able to easily upgrade an existing domain without the need to move all the files.

Transfer Files

You can move the files from remote server to your hosting server if your new customer has created their website on another location.

Customize Your Reseller Brand

You might want use your own brand name on the server even if you are reselling the services of the parent company.

WHM allows your own logo, cPanel style, documentation links and the public profile of company.

Market Provider Manager

With this feature, you can manage as well as display products that customers might purchase via their cPanel such as SSL certificate contract for multiple years or package upgrade.

This feature lets you manage and display products that the customers may purchase through their cPanel, such as multi-year SSL contract or package upgrade.

SSL Certificates Management

Being a reseller, customers will expect that your hosting offers everything they need, including SSL. Fortunately, you’ll find the feature to install and manage it in the SSL/TLS tab.

Backup and Restore File

It is possible to activate automatic backups for running on a single or all accounts on your server. After this, the data will be uploaded to remote storage such as Google Drive, WebDAV and so on.

Provide CMS for cPanel Users

It is recommended that you provide several options for ensuring that your users can install their preferred content management system.

Tweaking

You will get a ton of features in this section that can add to or edit many things on your server. These include default login theme, spam protection, default login theme, and notification warnings.

Plugins for cPanel

cPanel works best with plugins like Munin (server monitor), ClamAV (virus protection), and Solr (text indexing). In case you find some of them useful for your customers, you can add them.

Access the Comprehensive Account Support

While using a platform like WHM, you are going to need support at some point for yourself as well as for your customers. In the end, if your service goes down even temporarily, your clients might face loss of revenue, which in turn will impact your reputation as a hosting provider.

MilesWeb offers 24/7 support, 365 days a year to help their resellers as well as their customers. That means the time zone you or your clients are in won’t matter, if something goes wrong because you can get help immediately.

If there is any issue on the servers, or if they go down, you will need help to get them up and running for your customers. If the downtime exceeds, it may force them opt for other reliable hosting provider.

This will affect the number of clients on your website as well as the future revenue growth as well. Once you will be known for unreliability, or not providing support, it will be tough for you to get future sales.

Conclusion

WHM is the most important tool in web hosting as it helps in managing multiple websites at once. Additionally, with WHM you can sell hosting services.

WHM offers several functionalities for reselling hosting services that enable you to have complete control over multi-sites management.

Hope that you now have a better understanding of WHM and the way you can use it for websites management.

The Author

I am a tech enthusiast and blogger, that has passionate about empowering businesses. I like to work on complex tech topics and makes them accessible, offering insightful advice to individuals. I give clear explanations in my blogs that help visitors to get the most out of technology.