WHM is the control panel you get as a reseller, and it sits one level above the cPanel your clients use. From it you create accounts, decide how much of your allocation each one receives, suspend and restore them, and reach into any client's cPanel without asking for their password. That last capability is the one that changes how you work day to day: a client says their email is broken, and you are looking at their settings ten seconds later.
Your WHM login details arrive in the welcome email when the reseller account is provisioned. What follows is how to reach it, what the two panels are each for, and the settings worth changing before you sell anything.
Reaching WHM
Two addresses work, and both go to the same place:
https://yourdomain.com:2087 https://yourdomain.com/whm
The port 2087 form is the direct one. Use https rather than the plain port 2086. You are about to type credentials that control every client account on your allocation.
Once your private nameservers are set up you can use the server hostname instead, which keeps working even when an individual domain's DNS is being changed.
The username and password are the reseller credentials from your welcome email, not a client's cPanel login. If you have lost them, reset from the client area rather than guessing: repeated failures will lock the address out.
WHM and cPanel are different jobs
The distinction confuses almost every new reseller, and it is worth being clear about because it determines where you go to solve a problem.
WHM is yours. Creating accounts, defining packages, setting limits, suspending, terminating, and seeing everything at once. Your clients never log in here.
cPanel is theirs. One per hosting account. Files, email, databases, subdomains, SSL for that one account. This is where a client installs WordPress or adds a mailbox.
So: "the client needs another database" is cPanel. "The client needs to be allowed more databases" is WHM. Going to the wrong panel first is the most common way ten minutes disappears.
Opening a client's cPanel from WHM
This is the feature that makes reseller support workable, and many resellers do not discover it for months.
Open List Accounts in WHM. Every account appears with its domain and username. Click the cPanel icon beside an account and you are inside that account's cPanel with full access, no password needed, because your reseller privileges already cover it.
You never have to ask a client for their password, which is worth insisting on as a policy. A client who is used to sending you their password is a client being trained into a habit that will eventually be exploited by someone impersonating you.
The screens you will actually use
List Accounts. Everything you host, searchable, with quick access to each. This is the screen to keep bookmarked.
Create a New Account. Where a new client becomes a real hosting account.
Account Information → Show Accounts Over Quota. Who is about to run out of disk. Worth checking before a client discovers it themselves.
Packages. The resource templates you assign to accounts. Define these before selling: see creating hosting packages.
Modify an Account and Upgrade/Downgrade an Account. Changing what an existing client gets. The second applies a different package wholesale; the first adjusts one account without touching the package.
Suspend/Unsuspend an Account. For non-payment, on request, or during an abuse investigation. Suspension is reversible and keeps the data, which is what makes it the right tool rather than termination.
Set these before you sell anything
Branding. Your clients see cPanel constantly. Leaving it unbranded tells them exactly whose infrastructure they are really on, which undermines the point of reselling. Customising branding goes over it.
Private nameservers. Clients pointing domains at ns1.yourbrand.com rather than a generic host's nameservers is the most visible part of a white-label setup. These are included on every Ahosting reseller plan.
Your contact address. WHM sends notifications about accounts over quota, suspensions and failures. Point them at an address you read, and not at a mailbox hosted on the reseller account itself.
Understanding your limits
Your reseller plan gives you a fixed number of cPanel accounts, a disk allocation and a bandwidth allocation. Everything you hand to clients comes out of that pool.
The practical consequence is that packages must be sized against the pool, not against what sounds generous. Selling five accounts with 10GB each out of a 15GB allocation works fine until clients actually use the space, at which point everyone is over quota at once.
WHM shows your usage against your allocation on the main statistics view. Look at it before adding accounts, not after a client reports a problem.
When you cannot get in
Connection refused on port 2087. A network or firewall between you and the server is blocking it. Try /whm instead, or a different connection.
The login is rejected. Confirm you are using reseller credentials in place of a client cPanel login, and that you are on the right hostname. Repeated attempts trigger a block, so reset rather than retry.
Certificate warning. Usually because you reached the server by an address the certificate does not cover. Use the hostname from your welcome email.
Once you are in, the natural next step is defining what you will sell, creating hosting packages comes before adding client accounts, because every account is created from a package.
For deciding what your clients see in their own cPanel, WHM Feature Manager and Feature Lists walks through the lists and how to attach them.
Which functions appear at all depends on what was granted, and a provisioning action can silently reset it. Reseller Privileges and ACLs in WHM sets out that failure.