Self-hosted, white-labelled and hosted-for-you are three different things
Self-hosted means you hold the files and serve them yourself. White-labelled means somebody else serves them with your logo on the front. Hosted for you means somebody else serves them and says so. All three are legitimate purchases and two of them are often the right one. Only one survives the supplier. The test is never what the page says — it is whether you can download the tour, open it with the network switched off, and put it somewhere else.
The three arrangements
- Self-hosted
- You receive the tour as files. You choose the host. The supplier’s servers are not in the path when a visitor opens it. If the supplier vanishes overnight, nothing about the tour changes, because nothing about the tour was theirs.
- White-labelled
- The supplier serves the tour from their infrastructure, on your domain or a subdomain of it, with your branding and none of theirs. It looks like yours. It is theirs. If the supplier vanishes, your domain still resolves and the tour does not load.
- Hosted for you
- The supplier serves the tour from their own domain, in their own interface, and everybody can see that they do. This is the most honest of the three, because it does not describe itself as anything else — and it is frequently the right purchase.
Nothing above is a criticism. A hosted tour is cheaper to start, somebody else patches it, and for a campaign asset with a life measured in months there is no reason to pay for portability you will never use. The problem is narrower than that and it is a vocabulary problem: all three are routinely sold using the words of the first.
The vocabulary problem, with two live examples
One platform in this field publishes a page headed with the words self-hosted virtual tours. It promises “total control over your content” and how it is presented. On 1 August 2026 we searched that page for the words export, download, zip, API, migrate, migration and FTP. None of them appears anywhere on it. What the page describes is customisation and branding inside the platform. That is white-labelling written in the vocabulary of self-hosting, and a buyer reading it quickly would come away believing they were being offered files.
The counter-example is the only article we found anywhere in this field that explains self-hosting properly. It names the exported files, lists the folders, and states the requirement outright: shared hosting or a VPS running PHP 7.4 or higher, with XAMPP or MAMP for a local test. That article is honest, and its honesty makes a real limit visible — a package that needs PHP needs a host that executes PHP, so “host it anywhere” quietly becomes “host it anywhere that runs a language runtime”. You cannot open it from a USB stick and you cannot drop it in a storage bucket.
Six questions, and what each answer means
| Ask this | Self-hosted answers | White-labelled or hosted answers |
|---|---|---|
| Can I download the whole tour as files, today? | Yes, and here it is | A link, an embed code, or a support ticket |
| Does it open with my network switched off? | Yes | No — it needs their server to be up |
| What has to run on the server? | Nothing. It is static files. | Their application |
| What happens if I stop paying? | Nothing. There is nothing to stop paying. | It comes down |
| Who can change the tour later? | Whoever holds the files and something to edit them with | The supplier, through their account |
| Where does a visitor’s browser actually connect? | Wherever you put the folder | Their infrastructure, whatever the address bar says |
The middle column describes how every tour on this site was delivered. The right-hand column is not a failure. It is a different product, and it should be sold as one.
The one test that settles it
Ask for the deliverable as a file, before you sign
One sentence: send me what I will receive at the end, as something I can put on a disk. The response to that request is the answer to the whole question, and it arrives before any money does.
Open it offline
Airplane mode, then double-click the entry file. A tour that runs with no network has everything it needs inside it. A spinner, an error or a blank frame means part of it lives somewhere else.
Move it, and open it again
Copy the folder to a different disk or a different path and open it from there. Some packages only work from the location they were installed to. That is worth finding out now rather than during a website migration.
Check what the host has to run
Search for files ending .php, .py or .rb, or a package.json. If they are present, the folder is real but the hosting promise is narrower than “anywhere”. Ask the supplier to say which hosts qualify.
Which one to actually buy
This is the part most posts on this subject skip, because the honest answer is not always the one that sells the most expensive option. Buy for the dependency, not for the principle.
- Hosted for you if the tour is a campaign asset with a life measured in months, nothing downstream depends on it, and simplicity is worth more than portability.
- White-labelled if brand consistency on your own domain is the point and continuity genuinely is not.
- Self-hosted if anything outlives the supplier relationship: a property listing, a tender or procurement record, a staff induction, an institutional archive, a website rebuild already in the diary, or a sale of the business.
- And if a product is described to you as self-hosted, ask for the folder anyway. It costs one email and it is the only version of this question with a factual answer.
We build the third kind, and it is not a moral position — it is the shape of the business. There is no platform behind us to keep you inside, so there is nothing for us to lose by handing the files over, which is exactly why we can. What arrives on the last day sets out the contents of the folder, and the rate card is the same whichever way you decide to host it.
Sources, and when we last checked them
- CloudPano, “Self-hosted Virtual Tours” product page Checked August 2026 Opened 1 August 2026. Promises total control over your content. The words export, download, zip, API, migrate, migration and FTP do not appear on the page.
- Lapentor, “How to Run a Self-Hosted Virtual Tour from Lapentor”, published 24 September 2025 Checked August 2026 Lists index.php and db.php among the exported files and requires shared hosting or a VPS running PHP 7.4 or higher; names XAMPP and MAMP for local testing.
Questions people ask
- Is white-labelling dishonest?
- No. White-labelling is a normal, useful arrangement and plenty of good suppliers offer it. It becomes a problem only when it is described with the vocabulary of self-hosting, because the buyer then believes they hold something they do not. Ask the download question and the ambiguity disappears in one exchange.
- If my tour is on your subdomain, is that self-hosted?
- It is hosted by us, and we say so. The difference is that you were also given the files, so the hosting is a convenience rather than the product. You can copy the folder to your own server and change where your link points, at any time, without asking us.
- What should I ask for in writing?
- One line: “At the end of the job, what do I receive, in what format, and what has to be running on a server for it to work?” Keep the reply. It is the only part of a sales conversation that cannot be re-described later.
- Can I move a tour from a platform to self-hosting?
- Sometimes, and it depends entirely on what you can get out. If you can export the original panoramas at full resolution, a new tour is a build job. If all you can retrieve is what the player streams to a browser, that is display-resolution output of a master you do not hold, and a replacement starts at the capture. Ask your current supplier for the masters before you decide anything else.
