What Vanity Mode Is (and Why It Sells)
PUQ Web Hosting module WHMCS
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The idea in one sentence
You own a memorable domain — say benchwords.com — and you rent out names on it. A customer who picks ruslan gets:
- a website at
ruslan.benchwords.com, and - an email address
ruslan@benchwords.com,
…provisioned in seconds, billed by WHMCS, and fully self‑service. One domain you already own becomes an unlimited catalogue of "personal site + email" products.
Why customers buy it
Registering a domain, configuring DNS, setting up mail and getting a website online is intimidating for most people. Vanity removes all of that: pick a name on a brand they already like, and they have a real site and a real inbox. It is the simplest possible hosting product to buy — which makes it the easiest to sell.
This is exactly what the customer ends up with — a clean two‑card dashboard, Website and Email, with nothing else to configure:
How it differs from normal hosting
A normal (Split/Unified) service gives the customer a whole domain and the full toolbox — DNS records, multiple mailboxes, SSL, backups, subdomains. A vanity slot is deliberately minimal:
| Normal hosting | Vanity slot | |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | the customer's own domain | one name on your domain |
| Website | full account | a per‑service web account for name.yourdomain.com |
| Mailbox | create/delete many | exactly one fixed mailbox name@yourdomain.com |
| DNS | full zone editor | nothing to manage — one record on your zone |
| SSL / Backups / Subdomains | customer‑managed | handled for them (mail SSL lives on your provider domain) |
The customer never sees DNS, SSL, backups or zone editing — those don't apply to a slot. The trimmed client menu reflects that.
The safety guarantee (read this)
Vanity mode is destructive‑safe by design. No matter what a customer does — order, change password, set forwards, cancel — the module only ever touches:
- the per‑service web user for that one subdomain,
- one mailbox on your shared provider mail user, and
- one DNS record (in push mode) for the subdomain.
It never touches the parent mail domain, the DNS zone, or your provider Hestia user. One customer's actions can never affect another customer or your base domain. You will see this guarantee restated on the setup screen — it is a load‑bearing invariant of the whole model.
Two ways to sell it
- Inside WHMCS — a normal product with a live name‑availability check on the order form (covered in The vanity product and Order & client experience).
- Anywhere — a standalone shop widget (two small files) you drop on any marketing domain. It shows a "claim your name" landing page and sends buyers straight into your prefilled WHMCS cart (covered in The vanity shop widget).
The next pages set it up end‑to‑end: first the server group + sellable domains, then the product, then the order/client experience, then the widget.