White label and your own nameservers

Three things give the game away if you skip them:

• The nameservers they are told to set — ns1.hostsawa… rather than ns1.yourbrand…
• The control panel branding, which carries a logo and support links
• The emails the system sends when an account is created

The logo is the one everybody does. The nameservers are the one everybody forgets, and they are the most visible: a customer pointing their domain reads that name and knows exactly who you buy from.

1. Pick the names — ns1.yourbrand and ns2.yourbrand on a domain you own 2. Create glue records at your registrar, pointing each name at the IP addresses we give you 3. Register them in WHM so new accounts are issued with them 4. Test with a domain you control before telling a customer

It takes about ten minutes, most of it waiting for the registrar. Open a ticket with the domain you want to use and we will give you the addresses and check the glue records with you.

In WHM you can set the logo, the company name, the support URL and the documentation links that appear in every customer’s cPanel. Point support at your own ticket system or email address, not at ours — a customer who finds our support form has worked out the arrangement and will wonder what your margin is.

Everything the customer normally touches can carry your brand: the panel, the nameservers, the emails, the invoices.

What it does not do is hide the underlying host from somebody determined to look. A WHOIS lookup on the IP address shows the network it sits on. That is true of every reseller arrangement everywhere, and no reseller programme can change it. In practice no customer does this.