Resellers
Sell hosting through resellers: reseller accounts held to their own plan, their packages and customers, overselling, white-label, suspension and grace periods.
A reseller is an account that sells hosting to its own customers on your server. Resellers create their own packages and customer accounts and manage them from their own panel login. ZoPanel keeps every reseller inside the plan you sold them, so one reseller cannot take more of the server than they paid for.
Reseller accounts need a Pro license.
Roles
| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| Administrator | Everything: server settings, every account, packages for direct customers and resellers |
| Reseller | Creates packages and customer accounts within the reseller's own plan. Sees only its own customers. Can also host its own websites. |
| Customer | Manages its own websites, databases, mail, files and backups |
Creating a reseller
- In Packages, create a package for the reseller. Set Sub-accounts (resellers) to the number of customer accounts the reseller may create (0 means unlimited). This field only applies to reseller packages.
- Set the other limits as the reseller's total: disk, websites, CPU, RAM, processes, PHP workers, and so on.
- In Accounts, click New account, choose the role Reseller and the package.
Reseller accounts can only be created by an administrator signed in to the panel. An API token cannot create them, even a full one.
How a reseller's plan limits its customers
The reseller's package is a ceiling for everything below it:
- Packages: a reseller cannot create a package that grants more than its own plan, for example more RAM, CPU, PHP workers, shell access or always-running PHP. If the plan does not allow something, saving the package fails and the message names the limits that are too high.
- Number of accounts: limited by Sub-accounts (resellers).
- Websites: the reseller's own websites and all its customers' websites together must stay within the plan's website limit.
- Disk space: the disk space of all customer packages together, plus the reseller's own, must fit in the reseller's disk space. A reseller cannot sell ten 10 GB packages on a 20 GB plan. Making an existing package bigger is also refused if the customers already on it would no longer fit.
- Later changes: if you lower a reseller's plan, its packages never grant more than the new plan, and the new limits apply to its customers at once.
Overselling
By default, a reseller's customers must fit inside the reseller's plan as described above. To allow overselling, turn on Settings → Let resellers oversell. When it is on, the disk-space and total-website checks are skipped, so the sum of customer packages may exceed the reseller's plan. Each customer package is still limited to the reseller's own plan.
What resellers manage
Signed in to their own panel, resellers have Accounts and Packages for their own customers. They can create, suspend, unsuspend and delete their customers, change their packages and passwords, and see their usage.
Resellers can also connect their own billing system with an API token from their own account. That token only sells the reseller's packages to the reseller's customers. See WHMCS and billing integrations.
White-label
With a Business license, you can replace the ZoPanel name under Settings → General → Panel name (white-label). The name appears in the panel and in notifications instead of ZoPanel. It applies to the whole server, so all resellers and customers see the same name. The field accepts up to 40 characters.
To use your own address for the panel, set Settings → General → Panel domain & SSL. The panel is then served at https://your-domain:8888 with a trusted certificate.
Suspension
Suspend on an account shows a suspension page on its websites and blocks its logins. Open sessions are signed out.
- Suspending a reseller also suspends all of its customers.
- Unsuspending the reseller brings back the customers that were suspended with it. A customer that someone else suspended separately stays suspended.
- A reseller cannot unsuspend an account that the administrator suspended.
- When the license no longer includes reseller accounts, for example after a downgrade, resellers can no longer manage customers. Websites keep running.
Termination and the grace period
Deleting an account removes its websites, databases, mail and files from the panel. By default the data is not destroyed at once. It is kept for a grace period, so a termination made by mistake, or by a billing system after a late payment, can be undone.
Set the period under Settings → General → Keep deleted accounts (days):
| Value | Effect |
|---|---|
| 7 (default) | Data is kept for 7 days |
| 1–90 | Data is kept for that many days |
| 0 | Data is deleted at once |
During the grace period:
- the home directory and the database dumps are in
/home/.zp-terminated/<user>-<time>/, - mailboxes are in
/var/vmail/.zp-terminated/<user>-<time>/.
Only root can read these folders, and the files do not count against the quota of a new account. To bring an account back, see "Account deleted by mistake" in Disaster recovery.
A reseller can only be deleted after its customers are deleted or moved. Accounts terminated through the provisioning API or a billing module follow the same grace period.