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Reseller, VPS, and dedicated support

How Panelbot supports reseller accounts and their downstream customers, plus VPS and dedicated servers, scoping every customer to what they own.

More than shared hosting

Plenty of hosting businesses sell more than a shelf of shared accounts. You might have resellers who run their own book of customers on top of your infrastructure, and you might sell VPS and dedicated servers to people who want a whole machine. Panelbot is built for all three, and the thing that makes it work across them is the same principle that governs everything else: every request is scoped in code to exactly what the person is confirmed to own, no matter which tier they sit in.

Reseller accounts and their customers

A reseller is a customer of yours who is also a provider to others. That two-level relationship is exactly where scoping mistakes tend to creep in, so it is where Panelbot is most careful.

When a reseller opens a chat, Panelbot recognises them as a reseller and works within the set of accounts they actually control. It understands that a reseller’s own hosting and the accounts they resell are related but distinct, and it keeps the boundaries straight. A reseller gets help across the accounts under their control; they do not get a window into accounts that belong to a different reseller or to your direct customers.

The reseller’s own downstream customers are handled too. When one of them opens a chat, Panelbot confirms which account is theirs and helps only within it. A downstream customer cannot reach the reseller’s other clients, and cannot reach up into the reseller’s own account. Each layer sees only its own slice, and that slice is decided by your records, not by anything typed into the chat.

When you are the reseller

You do not need to own the server to use Panelbot. If your hosting business runs on a reseller account at an upstream provider, you connect that account over the panel API with your own reseller credential: a WHM API token on cPanel, a login key on DirectAdmin. There is nothing to install and no root to ask for, and you do not need your upstream host to whitelist anything to connect. On cPanel/WHM and DirectAdmin alike, Panelbot shows a server you reach only through a reseller login (on DirectAdmin, a reseller or user login key) as Reseller server (limited access). The server agent needs root, so Panelbot never offers it on a reseller server; root-level work there stays with the server’s own host.

Panelbot then works within what your reseller credential allows, which covers the account-level checks and fixes your customers ask about most: accounts, email, DNS on cPanel, disk and quota, listing databases (and repairing them on cPanel), password resets, and on cPanel reading a site’s certificates and switching its HTTPS redirect. Some jobs are outside a reseller credential:

  • WordPress repairs through the WordPress command line, such as turning off a crashing plugin, switching a theme, or repairing core files, run through a helper that only exists on a server with the optional agent. A reseller credential cannot run them, and neither can a root token on its own.
  • AutoSSL runs and AutoSSL logs need a root WHM token (or the agent) under the current mapping.
  • Server-wide jobs, such as reading raw server logs, restarting services, or clearing cPHulk blocks, need root on the server.

Unblocking a customer’s IP in CSF or Imunify360 without the agent is not available today; IP unblocks run through the optional agent, on cPanel and DirectAdmin alike. Your server’s capability list may show the two IP-unblock rows as available when your upstream host has granted the CSF or Imunify360 reseller plugin to your account; Panelbot does not unblock through that grant today, so treat those two rows as agent-only until this page says otherwise.

When the server connects, Panelbot shows you exactly what the credential can and cannot reach, so there are no surprises in a live chat. A request that lands outside that reach is handed to your team rather than attempted. See Connect your first server.

VPS and dedicated servers

A VPS or a dedicated server belongs to a single customer who has the whole machine, and Panelbot treats it accordingly. Because the customer owns the entire server, some actions that would be off-limits on shared hosting are reasonable here, since they affect only that customer and no one else.

A clear example is bringing a crashed site back. On shared hosting, restarting the process that runs a site would touch every account on the machine, so Panelbot will not do it on its own and escalates instead. On a VPS or dedicated server, that same restart affects only the one customer who owns the box, so where you have enabled action-taking, it can be offered directly with a confirmation step. The impact is what changes, and Panelbot reads the tier to judge it correctly rather than applying a single blunt rule everywhere.

Even with a whole machine to themselves, the customer is still scoped to their own server. Owning one VPS never grants any visibility into another customer’s VPS, and the most sensitive class of server-level change stays reserved for your own team.

Ownership is the constant across every tier

The tiers differ in what is safe to do, but they do not differ in how ownership is settled. In every case Panelbot confirms in code, against the records synced from your billing portal, that the person actually owns the account or server in question before it inspects or changes anything. Whether the customer is a reseller, one of a reseller’s clients, a VPS holder, or a plain shared-hosting account, the check is the same and it runs every time.

This is what lets you point one assistant at a mixed book of business without worrying that the boundaries blur. A reseller cannot inherit your direct customers, a downstream client cannot reach their neighbour, and a VPS owner cannot see the next machine along. The scope is drawn from what each person owns, and the chat has no power to redraw it.

What stays with your team

Across all of these tiers, the same limits hold as everywhere else in Panelbot. Higher-impact changes always require a person on your team to approve them. Changes that affect a whole shared machine are escalated rather than taken automatically. And the most powerful, server-breaking class of operation is never available to the assistant at all, on any tier. Resellers, VPS, and dedicated support widen who Panelbot can help, not what it is allowed to do without you.