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Tips for Ensuring the Security of Your Reseller Web Hosting Server

The easiest way to launch a hosting reseller business is to lease a server from a web hosting provider and leverage a cPanel or Plesk to host as many customers on that server as possible. You can bring new projects, i.e., offering a complete web design package and hosting services to grow your revenue base. The more customers you get, your hosting reseller business becomes more profitable.

In an ideal world, that’s all you need to tap into incremental revenue opportunities. But unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world. Sooner or later, reseller hosting can face challenges that can disrupt hosting operations and threaten the entire business. These challenges can be security breaches.

Ensuring the utmost server security should be the number one priority for web hosting companies. According to the statistics, 30,000 websites are hacked and compromised daily, and every 39 seconds, the web experiences a new attack.

Therefore, considering the increasing cybersecurity threats, your responsibility as a Reseller host is to secure your hosting server against online threats.

In this article, we have developed six effective security strategies for your Reseller hosting service that also helped us to protect our servers from security breaches.

But first, let’s take a short overview of what Reseller Hosting is.

What Is Reseller Hosting?

Reseller hosting is a web hosting service that allows you to provide multiple web hosting plans and start your own business with minimal investment.

You can personalize the web hosting plans as you want with some add-on services to sell them at competitive rates to earn profits. As a hosting reseller, you don’t need technical expertise to set up the servers. Instead, a managed hosting provider will do it for you and provide you with useful tools like WHMCS for automated billing and invoicing and WHM and cPanel for seamless website management.

Thus, as a hosting reseller, it’s your responsibility to create custom web hosting plans, provide customer support, and take care of Reseller accounts to ensure the best uptime, performance, and security.

Now, let’s see how you can protect your hosting reseller business against online threats.

Six Effective Ways to Secure Your Reseller Hosting

A reseller hosting business comes in various shapes and sizes, and cyberattacks spare no one. Therefore, ensuring high server security is a need for every business and website.

Here are the six most efficient tips to secure your Web Hosting Reseller Server against online threats.

Offer SSL Certificates to Your Customers

Having an SSL certificate has now become a basic need for a website. It’s an excellent way to protect your website and ensure high security against data breaches. It protects the data transferred between your site and your customer’s browser. Hence it’s an excellent way to gain customers’ trust.

Data encryption makes it difficult for hackers to intercept and collect confidential information about your business and customers. You also get the added benefit of improving SEO and conversion rates for all your customers’ sites.

There was a time when SSL certificates were cost-prohibitive. But thanks to the not-for-profit Internet Security Research Group’s open certificate authority, web hosting resellers can now offer SSL certificates to all their customers at no cost. Additionally, issuing and installing these SSL certificates has always been challenging, thanks to features like cPanel’s AutoSSL.

Offer CDN with Your Reselling Hosting Plans

Cybersecurity threats are overgrowing, and every time your server has to process a request, there is a high possibility that the request is malicious. In this situation, reducing the number of requests to your server helps minimize the number of potential attacks on your system.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a very effective way to offload requests from your server to the server of a CDN provider and reduce the attack vectors on your server. CDNs used to be expensive, but today many service providers like Cloudflare offer basic CDN for free, including services like basic DDoS attack mitigation, further improving the security of your customer’s site. Cloudflare also offers partner programs and paid services with additional security features like WAF, TLS-only mode, enhanced DDoS mitigation, etc.

In essence, CDNs also offer performance benefits that can dramatically improve your customer’s site performance and SEO. Moreover, offering CDN to your customers is a smart move to grow your business.

Implement Two Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication significantly minimizes the risk of unauthorized and unauthenticated access to your customer’s website. It requires your customers to go through two user authentication and verification steps to prevent phishing scams and other means.

It augments the standard username and password authentication (what you know) with a secondary token (what you have) to protect weak employees’ passwords and credentials.

Hence, implementing 2FA in the control panel ensures the utmost security of your client’s websites, securing your Reseller Hosting Server. It’s also a good idea to ensure that your hosting partner has also implemented two-factor authentication in their management console.

Enable Web Application Firewall

A Web Application firewall is an essential tool provided by almost all hosting companies. It protects websites against various digital attacks like cross-site scripting, SL injection, session hijacking, bad user agents, trojans, and other common exploits.

Implementing a web application firewall can dramatically improve the security of your customers’ websites, especially when you consider that 70% of all attacks are now carried out at the application level. But remember to check for updates regularly, as new attacks always come out.

Like most hosting resellers, you may need more time or skills to manage a WAF properly. That’s why it’s essential to make sure that you’re working with a hosting partner who understands WAF and can help you keep on top of managing it.

Update Your Software Regularly

Outdated software and applications are primary security concerns and reasons behind online attacks.

Software updates are meant to fix bugs and also have security patches. It’s important to update every element, including your CMS, operating system, and databases, to reduce the risks of cybersecurity breaches and attacks on your client’s websites. However, not prioritizing regular upgrades can pose a significant risk for your server. Besides using the updated version, trustworthy software is also essential.

Run Security Scans

Numerous scanning solutions are available to make it easier for hosting Resellers to identify security vulnerabilities and loopholes within the system. Generally, there are two categories, solutions that focus on identifying security weaknesses on your server and those that focus on identifying security weaknesses on your customers’ websites. A combination of both will help ensure that you’ve covered all the possible security vulnerabilities that may affect your customers.

Thus, scan your website regularly and encourage your customers to do the same to identify weaknesses and security gaps and ensure better server security.

Final Verdict

It’s easy to start a Web Hosting Reseller business and earn passive revenue from your clients. But ensuring the best possible security against cyberattacks is also crucial as a hosting Reseller.

The increasing risks of cybersecurity attacks and online threats require the greatest attention to server security. So, implement the tips mentioned above to secure your Reseller Hosting Server.

AEserver offers exceptional Reseller hosting solutions with on-call support, free cPanel and enhanced security to facilitate our clients’ running a secure web hosting business. So, check out our services and choose a relevant Reseller Hosting & Domain plan for your business.