Hi all, first of all I would like to say hello as I'm new here.

I have a lot of confusing thoughts swirling around in my brain at the moment.

I have a reseller account because I am in the process of transferring from web design to web development (or trying to). I bought a resellers hosting package so that I could host sites for my customers. Not a problem in its self. I can set up packages / create accounts etc no problem with WHM.

My problem is that the accounts all have the same IP address because of shared addressing. This is ok in its self again, but what happens when i need to point a domain name to the IP? How does it know which site it should direct to? Is this a case where an A-record could direct the domain name to the correct sub-directory on the server?

I know I can view the things I want to on the server using

24.34.44.54/~example/

I am worried now that when I need to point a domain at a certain account I won't be able to do it.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated, and I already feel incredibly dumb for having to ask but I have spent all afternoon attempting to read up on it and all I have achieved is to confuse myself even more.

Thanks in advance and look forward to being able to contribute back in other areas.

Mark

Not quite.

The "A" record points a hostname to an IP

then, depending on the server technology you use either VirtualHosts (Apache) or hostheaders (IIS) to point the hostname to the physical locations on the server drive.

You are a gent! That at last gives me an idea of what to start reading about. Incidentally I used to live in Blackpool for a while. How is the old place? Still full of drunks as ever?

How is the old place? Still full of drunks as ever

Yep, still plenty of them around, and of course it gets worse during the holiday season

your name servers take care of that routing problem.

Unless you have your own shared IP (i.e. the IP is exclusive to your account, but shared between your/clients domains - but no other customer of the provider), I very much doubt you will be able to specify where the IP points to.

E.g. if you have a number of domains hosted on 24.34.44.54, they'll all resolve fine to that IP and will load up when you enter http://www.domain.com or similar.

However, if you enter http://24.34.44.54 then this will load whatever the provider has decided - maybe their website...

If you want to determine what happens when a user tries to visit http://24.34.44.54 you will (most likely) need to get an exclusive/dedicated IP from your provider.

Perhaps something that you haven't considered - reseller hosting plans that are (in effect) shared hosting are really easy for customers to figure out who your actual provider is; depending on the technical ability of your clients this may be a problem since in general people can pay less for better service from providers directly rather from resellers.

To add more branding etc. you should look to use your own nameserver addresses (including own IP addresses - don't just register your nameserver addresses to the same IPs used by your provider's nameservers). Ideally I'd recommend considering a VPS instead of reseller hosting (budget permitting) as you get a lot more flexibility, and it's infinitely more scalable for the future.

The upgrade path from a reseller plan will involve downtime, migrations, and all of the associated inconvenience (even if you stay with the same provider). If you can afford to start with a VPS, take that option as you can (usually) upgrade those plans to higher specifications and/or other platforms without downtime/migrations - or even where either are required the process will be much easier and consequently downtime and associated complications are massively reduced.

In the case, you will need to get a dedicated ip for your client account. when there is need, ask them to pay for it.