A Few 2.0 Questions for Resellers

[lonestarr]

I found this text in your first Westhost 2.0 Announcement:

New Reseller Program and Manager
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If you're a reseller or considering becoming one, you'll be excited about what we're doing for WestHost 2.0. As a reseller, you'll be able to brand the hosting service as your own and completely customize the signup process. You'll also have access to our billing system for use in managing your own clients and their invoices/accounts. More importantly, with the new "Reseller Manager" you'll be able to create custom packages and service offerings for your clients and completely control the allocation of space, bandwith, services, etc.

I'm just wondering if you can give us a few more details about what "access to our billing system" means. How would that work exactly? Would we still need to have our own Merchant Account?

Also will 2.0 solve the problem of providing clients with a secure server. Currently the secure server for every account is branded with your name:
https://secure.westhost.com/secure/username/...
Will there be a more generic url for us to use?

You guys were the best when I found you a few years ago and you still are today! I'm really excited about the progress you guys are making. Can't wait for 2.0!

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

The billing manager that will be available to our resellers with WestHost 2.0 will be the same manager tool that we will be using here. It will automatically update when you have new customers sign up, it will set generate invoices and billing messages for you, and much more. You will still need your own merchant account to do the actual processing, but this manager will make the whole process very easy to manage.

As a reseller you can currently use https://secure.westserver.net/... to provide non-branded secure pages to your clients. That will continue to be available with WestHost 2.0. This is similar to the non-branded DNS settings that we provide for our resellers.

We appreciate the positive feedback, we are really excited about the upcoming changes too!

[lonestarr]

Just a quick question. I tried to use the "https://secure.westserver.net/..." url to access my secure files but got a 403 Forbidden error. Are there any steps I need to take to use this non-branded url?

Thanks again!

[web1x]

Wow, I didn't realize the non branded options for secure server and DNS. How do I go about using them?

Also, are there any options for non branded webmail and control panel? Will that be available with Westhost 2.0?

Thanks and keep up the good work!!!

[WestHost - CSimiskey]

Answers to your questions:

First the easy ones:
Non-Branded webmail:
http://webmail.westserver.net

Control Panel: Our control panel is non branded for everyone, so that should already be working for you.

Now, for a reseller's client that has a Starter 1 or 2 account, those accounts, by default, were not placed on a server that has its own SSL certificate. If you did have a Starter 3 or greater account, then you would have been setup on a server with a non-branded SSL certificate (we have 5 just FYI). So with that said, to get a non-branded SSL account for one of your Starter 1 or 2 resold accounts, you (the reseller) would have to have us sestup an additional user account under your own domain for your client. This would then bounce the resold account through your account for SSL access something similar to this:
https://secure.westserver.net/resellerdomain/resoldaccountname/files
All of this is assuming you are on an SSL server (if you are not, we can move you (the reseller) to one for no additional cost)
*NOTE* that this is not a preferable method as it uses the resellers bandwidth and disk space, so the better option would be to upgrade your client to a Starter 3 account or higher so their account can be moved to a SSL server. Also, if your clients are using Miva Merchant with their SSL, they would have to upgrade to the Starter 3 plan no matter what.

Every reseller account is given our non branded DNS information (NS.westserver.net & NS2.westserver.net). You can personalize your DNS (NS.yourdomain.com & NS2.yourdomain.com) if you would like for $10/month. If you are interested in getting your own DNS settings, contact our sales department at sales@westhost.com and they can set that up for you.