Creating A Cloud Product Using Reseller Plugin

In the previous few articles we installed the WHMCS plugin and configured it with the VPS API. This article will cover the fun part, actually using the plugin to create new cloud based products! We’ll go over the plugin’s “Product Setup Wizard”, which makes it easy to create new products based on our Cloud VPS, Cloud Dedicated VPS, and Private Cloud products.

Creating a VPS hosting product in WHMCS

Once you’re WHMCS server and plugin are setup and connected to the Liquid Web API you can get started making products. The first thing to do is pulling up the product setup wizard.

1. Open the Liquid Web Product Setup Wizard in WHMCS.
   1. Hover over the “Addons” tab in the WHMCS admin section.
      
   2. You should see “Liquid Web Cloud Servers”, click on this to continue.
   3. After you click on “Liquid Web Cloud Servers” you will be taken to a configuration page for the plugin. To access the Product Setup Wizard click the link on the left sidebar, as shown below.
      
2. With the Product Setup Wizard now open, select the product type to create.
   The available server types to configure are as follows:
   • Liquid Web SSD VPS & Cloud Dedicated – Pick this option if you want to resell Liquid Web’s SSD VPS offerings, or Cloud Dedicated offerings. This option allows you to start selling Liquid Web’s Cloud Platform without having to purchase infrastructure up front. If someone purchases a product that’s based on one of our VPS options, and you approve the order, the plugin will automatically provision the VPS or Cloud Dedicated configuration that was selected.Basically your client pays you, then you pay us. This is a great option for anyone just getting started up!Also, if you care about the website performance, you really will want to resell our SSD VPS line. It has industry leading performance for CPU, Disk I/O, as well as LAMP stack performance, check out this VPS performance benchmarking report for more info!
   • Liquid Web Private Cloud – Pick this option if you want to offer custom sized VMs, or want to maximize your profit margins. With this option there will be upfront costs as you must have a Private Cloud under your account in order for the plugin to detect available resources.If you already have a handful of clients, or VMs you’re paying for, Private Cloud may be of interest to you as it can significantly lower your cost per client while providing them with the same resources.

   For this example I will be using the “Liquid Web SSD VPS & Cloud Dedicated” option. I will be covering how to resell our Private Cloud offering in a future KB article, so stay tuned!
   Check the box next to “Liquid Web SSD VPS & Cloud Dedicated”, then click “Next” to continue.

3. Create Your First SSD VPS Product
   
   As you can see, there are more than a handful of items to configure. For this guide I will be focusing on the most important items you will want to configure. I’ll be covering the other settings in detail in a later KB article, stay tuned!
   
   1. Zone – Determines which zone the VPS will be created in. By default, Zone C is selected. There’s little reason to change this unless you specifically want to provision servers in our datacenters located in our US West Coast DC, or Europe DC locations.
   2. VPS Type – Determines the VPS configuration that will be deployed when this product is ordered. If you selected the “Liquid Web SSD VPS & Cloud Dedicated” option, you will be able to pick from both product types. To change the configuration, click on the magnifying glass to the right of the field. Please keep in mind that prices listed here are for the VPS ONLY. There may be extra costs associated with the VPS, depending on the template / VPS image you choose to provision.

      

      
   3. OS Template – Determines the type of OS that will be deployed on the VPS, also determines if the VPS will have a control panel or not (cPanel/WHM or Plesk). There are three main types of templates to pick from:
      • Fully Managed – These templates come with a control panel. Generally they cost $10/mo for VPS servers and $20/mo for Cloud Dedicated. Any server with a fully managed template includes managed support (part of the cost).
      • Core Managed – These templates do not come with a control panel. However, they do come with managed support. This template type is a good option if you have advanced customers who do not want a control panel, but still want some type of managed support.
      • Self Managed – These templates come with no control panel and no support. There’s no extra cost if you provision a server with a self managed template. These templates are unmodified and do not come with any type of automate updates other than what the OS provides out of the box.
   4. Price (monthly) – Last but certainly not least is the price you want to charge for this product. This should always be higher than what you pay (unless you just want to be a nice person). To determine what your cost is, add up the following:
      VPS Type Base Cost + OS Template Cost + Backup Quota Cost (if enabled) = $Your Cost
      If you wanted to sell our 2GB SSD VPS with CentOS 7 Fully Managed, with no backups, the formula would be:$49.99 + $10 + $0 = $59.99/mo (your cost)From there you can simply mark up the price by whatever percentage you want. If you want a 200% markup you would set the price to $119.98.
      Note:

      To view up to date pricing for VPS configurations, Backups, as well as OS templates please login to Manage and go to the “Create” section, where you’ll find lots of awesome products to use and/or resell!
4. Once you’ve finished configuring the product, and have set the price, click “Save and Continue” to complete the creation of this product.
   After you hit “Save and Continue” you will arrive back at the start of the product setup wizard.

Once complete, you’ll be back where you started. You might be thinking to yourself “did my product save?” or “why is there no confirmation / completion indication?”, even “why am I back at the start, do I have to start over?”. Perfectly valid questions, which I approve of, but worry not, your product was saved! Trust me!

Verify Product Creation

In case you don’t trust me, you can check for yourself by going to “Setup > Products / Services > Products / Services” where you will find a list of all the products you’ve created, with or without the plugin. You should see your brand spanking new cloud product under the “Liquid Web Products” category. You can of course change the category name to something else, it’s just the default we use.

That’s it for this article, hope you enjoyed! Next time we will go in-depth with product creation via WHMCS and Liquid Web’s Plugin.