|
This document explains the philosophy behind
resellers in H-Sphere.
Plans
The Reseller feature allows you to sell your hosting services
through resellers. Unlike in other control panels, resellers
in H-Sphere do not resell your plans.
Rather, they sell your hosting resources such as disk space,
traffic, mailboxes, etc. at retail prices, and
are charged for them at wholesale prices. In other
words, you set wholesale prices and allow your resellers to group
your resources into their own plans and define their own retail prices
for them. Resellers aren't charged for any resource until
their end-users come and buy them at retail price. This
makes resellers full-featured hosting providers with
complete freedom in developing their own sales policies and
creating hosting plans that are totally different from yours
by prices and combination of resources.
Double Nature of Resellers
Resellers in H-Sphere have a double nature. On the one hand,
resellers are user to the system, and have such basic user
features as online invoice, billing profile, billing info,
etc. On the other hand, resellers are administrators to their
customers (end users). Due to such double nature, they have
two control panels - a reseller cp and a reseller
admin cp. A reseller admin cp can be created
from inside the reseller cp. Further on, reseller admin
cp is available from the reseller's login/signup page or from
the reseller cp.
Private Label
With the reseller admin cp, each reseller gets a private
label hosting system, which leaves you completely
transparent to the end customer even at user signup and
domain registration. Resellers can have their
own independent control panel URL, DNS server names,
company information, and all other parameters visible from
the user's control panel. They will appear to end
customers as totally independent hosting companies.
Furthermore, reseller control panels are inaccessible by IP,
which excludes the possibility of accidental or intentional
visits to your control panel.
Look and Feel and Regional Settings
With their admin control panels, resellers can customize the look
and feel of their users' control panels. They can change colors,
replace all control panel images with those of their own, edit
many texts, change the control panel language, and the currency
of end user payments, etc. At the same time, the look and feel of
their reseller control panels will remain unchanged, as it
was set by the master admin.
Merchant Gateways
To accept credit cards, resellers must configure their merchant
gateways. They need to have their own accounts at the
credit card processing centers.
Providing Support
Resellers in H-Sphere have their own support centers
to answer trouble tickets from their customers. You only receive
internal system error notifications that are related
to the server configuration.
Control Panel
Resellers acquire almost all features offered by H-Sphere,
aside from Logical/Physical Server management, Miva License
Management, creating your own sub-resellers, and viewing summary
info for the whole hosting system.
Servers
Resellers' customers are automatically distributed across
your servers, and their home directories are created next
to the directories of your firsthand customers.
Billing
Resellers are charged for each individual unit of resources
purchased or used by their customers. Every time the system
creates a billing log entry for a reseller's customer, it
also creates a shadow billing log entry for the reseller.
The two entries will, however, show two different amounts,
as they use retail and wholesale prices respectively.
In other words, when an end user buys something, he is charged
by the reseller at the retail price, and the reseller is charged
a corresponding wholesale amount. When an end user is refunded,
the refund amount is credited to his account, and a corresponding
wholesale refund amount is credited to the reseller's account.
At the end of each day, the wholesale charges are summarized
by type, and a separate bill is created for each type of resources.
As the result, resellers do not see these charges until the next day.
|
