Reseller Quick Start Guide

Congratulations and thank you for purchasing a reseller package from A2 Hosting! This Quick Start Guide provides the information you need to get your site and your customers' sites up and running.

Your A2 Hosting Customer Portal

After you purchase a reseller package from A2 Hosting, you receive a Welcome e-mail message that provides information about how to access your account on the A2 Hosting Customer Portal. The Customer Portal enables you to view your account's product information, including:

• The domain name and IP address.
• cPanel and WebHost manager URLs and login information.
• FTP server and login information.
• E-mail server and login information.
• DNS name server information.
• SSH account information.

To find this information, please first log in to the A2 Hosting Customer Portal. It can be found at:

https://my.a2hosting.com/

Your new reseller space is located under the orange Your Active Products/Services section as shown in the screenshot below:

Click anywhere on your Reseller package. This will take you to the Manage page. The Manage page contains all the technical information you need for your account such as FTP, SSH, and cPanel login information:

For more information about how to use the Customer Portal, please see these articles.

Managing Your Reseller Accounts with cPanel/WHM

You can use WebHost Manager and cPanel to manage your own account and your customers' accounts.

WebHost Manager

WebHost Manager (WHM) allows you to run your business exactly as you see fit and offers unique customization to cater to the unique needs of your clients with the ability to create custom packages. With WHM, there are endless possibilities that you can use to deliver the best experience for your clients. WHM gives you control over the packages and features you’d like to sell and enables you to manage your customers' accounts. Our article How to manage WebHost Manager packages walks you through the process of creating packages so you can best serve your clients’ needs.

Once you have your customers set with packages that will best suit what their own sites need, you will want to create accounts for your clients. Our How to manage web hosting accounts with WHM article walks you through creating, modifying, and deleting accounts within WHM. 

A2 Hosting provides a wide variety of Knowledge Base articles about WHM that cover everything from password management, how to view your account’s disk and bandwidth usage, and how to use skeleton files to provide default content for customer accounts. Our Guru crew is there to help you deliver the best possible service to your clients and support your business as it grows.

cPanel

cPanel is the primary administration interface for your account. For more information about how to use cPanel, please see these articles.

Billing Interfaces

The WHMCS and Blesta billing interfaces are comprehensive billing, support, and automation solutions that can help you streamline how you run your business. The Reseller packages eligible for a WHMCS or Blesta license include:

• Kickstart/Turbo Kickstart (Blesta only)
• Launch/Turbo Launch
• Grow/Turbo Grow
• Scale/Turbo Scale

WHMCS

WHMCS is a comprehensive solution used by Reseller Hosting customers for the automation of their web hosting businesses. WHMCS is used for client administration, billing, and offering support. Appropriately enough, WHMCS is an acronym for Web Host Manager Complete Solution. WHMCS has an excellent reputation for being both highly flexible and for its quick feature release cycles. While not every hosting company has the same features or needs, WHMCS can be customized to fit those individual needs for each individual host.

Ordering WHMCS

Ordering a branded or unbranded WHMCS license is simple and straightforward. The unbranded licenses allow you to replace the customer-facing WHMCS branding with your own. The ordering process for a WHMCS unbranded or branded license is virtually the same, and our article How to order a WHMCS license will guide you through the process of getting your very own WHMCS license.

Installing WHMCS

You can have WHMCS up and running on your website in minutes by using the Softaculous application installer in cPanel. Simply follow the instructions in our Installing WHMCS using Softaculous article, and you’ll be up and running in no time!

Blesta

Blesta is a great alternative to WHMCS. This application functions as a client management, support, and billing platform that offers excellent client management and is a great choice for resellers. 

Ordering a Blesta License

Blesta licenses are free for all reseller hosting packages. In order to get started with using Blesta for your site, you first need to order a Blesta license.

Installing Blesta

Installing Blesta is a breeze once you receive your license. After your domain successfully resolves in a web browser, and the site has been secured with an SSL certificate, head on over to A2’s 1-click install Blesta using Softaculous article. This will guide you through the painless installation of Blesta.

Connecting WHM to WHMCS and Blesta

A2’s Connecting WHM to WHMCS guide shows you how to connect your account to WHMCS. Blesta users can refer to Blesta’s own documentation that describes how to connect Blesta to WHM.

E-mail

E-mail is an important part of running a web site, and cPanel makes it easy to set up and manage accounts. For more information about how to set up e-mail accounts for your domain, please see our article Configuring and accessing your e-mail. The article How to manage e-mail accounts in cPanel shows you how to add, modify, and delete e-mail accounts. Furthermore, our article How to access webmail through cPanel walks you through accessing webmail directly through cPanel. These articles will help you and your clients get your sites up and running in no time.

Domains and DNS

Domains

Domains are crucial to a site’s success. If you’re just starting out, our Introduction to Domains article will walk you through all of the basics when it comes to domains. If you would like to do an even deeper dive into the variety of domains offered, please refer to our article What are subdomains, addon domains and parked domains?

Transferring Domains

If you already own a domain that you purchased from a different registrar or hosting company, you can transfer the entire domain to A2 Hosting. All aspects of the domain, including billing and domain administration, are transferred from the registrar to A2 Hosting. For information about how to do this, please see How to transfer a domain to A2 Hosting. 

Setting Name Servers

If you already own a domain that you purchased from a different registrar or hosting company, you can change the domain's name server (DNS) settings to point to A2 Hosting's servers. Unlike a transferred domain, billing and domain administration remain with the domain's current registrar. For information about how to do this, please see How to set the name servers for a domain to point to A2 Hosting.

Default Name Servers

If you would like to use the default name servers for your account, our article Basic domain management using the Customer Portal shows you how to do so. This article also covers a wide variety of other topics, such as viewing domain information and setting the registrar lock for a domain. 

Custom Name Servers

Custom name servers are yet another way that you can customize your experience with A2 Hosting’s reseller plan. For example, you can use name servers such as  ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com, where example.com represents your domain name.

Once the A records have been added (or that you’ve verified that you already have functioning name servers,) you must register the custom name servers with the domain’s registrar. After completing these steps, you will reach out to our Support Team, who will add the new custom name servers to the A2 Hosting DNS cluster. The process is detailed in our How to configure custom name servers article.

DNS Propagation

After you’ve updated your domain settings, DNS propagation will take 24-48 hours to complete. You may not be able to access your site using your domain during this time period. However, our article How to access your web site before DNS propagation is complete shows you several methods for being able to access your site while you wait for DNS propagation to be completed.

FTP and SFTP

Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) is available on all reseller hosting accounts. This method is more secure than traditional FTP, as it utilizes SSH protocol to encrypt file transfers. Most FTP clients support SFTP. Our article Using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) covers FTP basics, while our article How to use FTP with Linux hosting accounts demonstrates how to use an FTP client and connect to your account.

SSH

Secure Shell (SSH) is a protocol that provides secure command-line access to your A2 Hosting account. SSH is a powerful tool that allows you to automate many processes for yourself and your clients. By using SSH, you can remotely log in to your A2 Hosting account and run commands as if you were sitting right at the server, and allows you to perform tasks that you cannot do with your account's included hosting control panel. Our How to use SSH article covers the basics of how to get started with using SSH, and our How to access your account using SSH keys article covers how you can deploy a variety of automated processes, such as two-factor authentication and allowing multiple users to transfer files securely using SFTP.

Securing Sites

CSF

The ConfigServer Firewall (CSF) within WebHost Manager is a powerful tool that helps you to secure sites. A2 Hosting’s How to Manage and Secure the CSF Firewall article is an in-depth guide that will help you to secure your site, and teach you important functions like how to unblock an IP address.

Free SSL Certificates

Free DV SSL certificates are provisioned automatically through a server-side program called AutoSSL.  SSL Certificates renew automatically to ensure continuous coverage. There are a few issues that might prevent AutoSSL from working as intended. Our article How To Setup AutoSSL On Your Domain will help you troubleshoot any problems that arise. 

Creating a Brand with WHM

Delivering to clients a customized experience is one of the best WHM features. Our WHM branding guide walks you through how to deliver a personalized experience for your clients. 

Migrating Sites

If you’re coming from another hosting provider and need to have your accounts transferred over, our Migration Team will be happy to assist you. Our Requesting a Site Migration article explains how to request a migration. The Site Migration Request page can be found in the Customer Portal. Most migrations take between 24-48 hours to complete (however, more complex migrations might take longer.)

Need help getting off the ground?

Do you have any questions about your account? We are here 24/7 to help! We have a support page where you can search the A2 Hosting Knowledgebase, submit a Support ticket, give us a call or chat live with one of our Guru Crew team members. Visit our Support page now if you need assistance:

https://my.a2hosting.com