When you operate a web hosting facility, 100% of your attention can be in profit generation and customer service-not in cables, crashes, and cooling costs. If you’re an entrepreneur wanting to offer web hosting services to your customers without being burdened by the logistics of owning and maintaining physical servers, the best way to do it is to partner with an established company.
Your clients trust you to keep their websites safe, fast and available 100% of the time. A single security mistake can negatively impact your client's business and at the same time damage your reputation as a trustworthy provider. Therefore, security practices must be the foundation of every best reseller hosting provider plan.
Security is not just about avoiding hacking when you own a reseller white-label web hosting account. It is an effort to protect against any type of security breach, including protecting against the theft of sensitive personal information, ensuring that the website is up when the customer wants to view it, protecting against unauthorized access to email accounts, maintaining backups of the customer's website, and providing a secure browsing experience for users who visit the customer’s website. Your reseller hosting business will grow naturally through the trust of your customers when they feel confident that their website is being hosted securely.
Security Layers in Reseller Hosting
Creating trust involves understanding how security layers function in a reseller hosting environment. Shared ownership of server resources makes it essential to isolate reseller accounts from one another. By utilizing container-based technology, modern hosting platforms are able to maintain a level of isolation between each reseller account and prevent one compromised hosting account from adversely impacting any other reseller account.
A strong firewall can protect your website from unwanted access or attacks and keep you safe from cybersecurity. A solid firewall will continuously keep track of all of the traffic going to and from your website. A solid firewall will also block any suspicious activity from happening on your website and prevent websites from being subjected to brute-force attacks. A good combination of firewalls with a malware scanner will ensure that your clients' servers are protected from harmful files.
SSL Certificate for Every Website
SSL certificates are now mandatory on all websites. Google and other search engines have made it clear that they expect every website to display that it is using the HTTPS protocol. Consumers have become accustomed to looking for the little green padlock symbol on their browser, and it is important for you to set up SSL certificates for each client that you work with so you can provide them with the same level of security as you would for your website. In addition, once SSL certificates are set up for all of your clients, you can expect to receive higher search rankings on search engines and build your reputation as a domain seller.
The Role of Backups in Protecting Client Websites
A backup is one of the most important factors related to securing reseller hosting, as backups provide peace of mind to resellers and their clients. No matter how secure a website may appear to be, there are always going to be accidents or mistakes that will require a website to be restored from a backup. Therefore, it is important for resellers to choose a hosting platform that offers the ability to easily recover a website and its data.
Resellers can feel confident knowing they can recover their clients' websites quickly without relying on a third-party service to do so.
Email Security and Long-Term Trust
Email security is also becoming increasingly important and is often a deciding factor for clients when selecting a web host. Email accounts are typically one of the most widely used features by clients (especially businesses) that rely heavily on email communication. Unfortunately, email spoofing, phishing, and spam can significantly damage a business's credibility and productivity. Resellers can protect their clients from these threats by providing them with secure email services, including tools such as spam filtering, authentication records, and virus scanning. In addition, most hosting companies today offer clients free email accounts for an unlimited period; however, they will only provide free email accounts for the first year after purchase. By offering unlimited free email accounts, resellers can provide added value to their clients and help increase their clients' trust in their services.
Updates and Patch Management
Due to the lack of timely updates to software (CMS, plugins and themes), many security breaches have occurred. So, as a reseller, encourage your customers to keep all of these up-to-date so they don't give hackers an easy target to scan for vulnerable software. Certain hosting services can automate updating (of most applications), which significantly reduces the likelihood of a hacking incident as a result of outdated code.
The Importance of Monitoring and Incident Response
In a reseller-hosting environment, monitoring your data is important in preventing a security breach. Monitoring resource usage and login attempts and identifying unusual activity allow you to catch potential threats as early as possible before they have the opportunity to become serious incidents. Additionally, by acting promptly to alerts, you'll minimize the impact that a security breach can have on your customers and therefore your business. An incident response plan with clearly defined procedures to isolate compromised accounts, restore backups and notify your customers of the incident and the available remedies must be created.
Educating Clients About Safe Practices
Clients depend on you to help them understand security. Some clients may not fully know what it means to protect their data or why it is important. You help to minimize the risk of having a client’s site hacked or compromised by educating your clients on how to create strong passwords, install safe plugins, perform regular updates, and use secure email accounts.
If you give your clients proper information and support, they will be more likely to trust you and continue using your expertise for their hosting needs for the future.
Summary
Your ability to build and maintain your reputation as a successful reseller hosting provider will depend on how well you protect your clients' websites from harm. Building a secure environment is not just a one-time task but rather an ongoing activity.
When you provide your customers with a reseller hosting environment that includes backups, SSL certificate options, continual monitoring, professional technical support, and safe email accounts, you create an environment that provides a sense of security.
When you can provide your clients with a high level of trust, it allows you to continue to grow your reseller business through reliability, transparency, and proven methods of protecting your clients’ websites.
