Creating packages in WHM

Last updated: 21 April 2021

All hosting packages have a limited amount of resources. That includes your reseller account. As you add more accounts you want to make sure that you don’t suddenly exceed your resource limits.

Planning your packages

This involves some planning. For example, the Power Reseller package gives you 20GB of disk space and 300GB of bandwidth per month. That is the total amount of disk space and bandwidth you can use for all your accounts. To make sure one or two accounts don’t eat up all the resources you can set limits on individual accounts.

To illustrate, I might use a reseller hosting package to host various small websites. The smallest websites need very little space – maybe up to 250MB – and the largest websites need no more than 2GB. To accommodate the websites I can create three different hosting plan:

• Plan 1 comes with 250MB of disk space, 5GB of bandwidth and one FTP account, database and alias. All other resources, including email accounts are set to 0.
• Plan 2 increases the disk space limit to 1GB and has 20GB of bandwidth. It also has one email account (with a quota of 1GB).
• Plan 3 further increases the disk space quota to 2GB and the bandwidth limit to 40GB. The plan allows up to three email accounts and also adds a subdomain.

In short, by setting limits on hosting plans you can be sure that your reseller account always has enough disk space and bandwidth.

Overselling

To get the most value out of your reseller package you can use overselling. That is, the sum of the disk space and bandwidth assigned to individual accounts can be greater than the total amount of disk space and bandwidth assigned to your reseller package.

A small amount of overselling is perfectly fine. It is quite likely that many of your customers don’t use anywhere near their allotted resources. If your customers use only 50 per cent of their resources on average then it makes sense to oversell.

That said, you do need to be careful. All our servers are configured to prevent the “noisy neighbour” problem. You are sharing your reseller account with other users on the server, and there are limits to how much memory and CPU time each account can consume. This protects you from other (“noisy”) users on the servers, and vice versa.

Creating packages

You can add new packages via WHM » Account Functions » Add a Package. You need to give the package a name (such as “Plan 1” or “Bronze”) and define the available resources. The most important values are the disk space quota and monthly bandwidth, but there are many others.

Most of the options are obvious. There are a few that are worth mentioning though:

• Max Quota per Email Address (MB) is the maximum size of an email account. The default value is 1 gigabyte (or, strictly speaking, 1 gibibyte). If a user creates an email address then the size can be less then 1GB, but it can’t be more.
• Max Passenger Applications is the maximum number of Ruby applications.
• Maximum Hourly Email by Domain Relayed is the maximum number of emails that can be sent from an account in an hour. The setting prevents that a compromised email account can send unlimited amounts of spam. Emails that can’t be sent because the limit has been exceeded are stored in the server’s mail queue.
• Maximum percentage of failed or deferred messages a domain may send per hour is a related setting. Spam emails typically have a high percentage of failed deliveries. So, you can use this value to suspend outgoing emails if there is a high percentage of email bounces for a domain. You can safely set this to 20%, unless you have users who somehow get lots of genuine email delivery failures.

Other options

There are also a few settings at the bottom of the page. In all likelihood, none of the options need to be enabled. Shell access is never enabled on reseller accounts and you can get a dedicated IP address for a website, but that is something we will need to add for you (contact us if you want a unique IP address for an account).

The Feature list is important. If you have created a custom feature list then you link it to the package here.

And finally, you also have the option to change the locale (language) used for the new account. This setting can also be changed in the cPanel account. In that case the locale is only changed for that cPanel account, and not all accounts that use the package.

Modifying packages

All the settings can be changed at any time via WHM » Packages » Edit a Package. Of course, you need to be careful. If, say, you decrease the disk space quota then you might suddenly have accounts that are over quota.

Other articles

This article is part of a series about reseller hosting:

• About reseller hosting
• WHM overview for resellers
• Feature lists in WHM
• Creating packages in WHM
• Creating cPanel accounts in WHM
• Managing cPanel accounts in WHM
• Managing DNS zones in WHM
• Customising cPanel accounts