If you run a web design agency and want to build recurring revenue, it’s a great idea to set up ongoing agreements to host your clients’ sites, rather than just turning completed sites over to them and ending the relationships right there.
But that adds another important decision to your plate — how do you find the right hosting solution for your client websites?
Searching for the best WordPress hosting for agencies?
There are some important hosting features that apply to both individuals and agencies. No matter if you’re hosting your own websites or your client’s sites, you want a host that offers fast performance, reliable uptime, quality support, and so on. Those are no-brainers in any hosting comparison.
But, if you’re an agency, you’ll also be looking for other features to make your life easier — and maybe even earn some extra money. For example, you may want easy billing transfer/management, granular site access controls to only give clients access to their own sites, a friendly billing structure for hosting lots of websites, special agency commissions, and more.
1. Flywheel
Flywheel is a popular managed WordPress host that made its name as a WordPress hosting solution for agencies and creative freelancers.
Since their launch, they’ve marketed themselves more towards freelancers and agencies than individual WordPress users. More important than the marketing copy, they’ve also built a bunch of unique features designed to make agencies’ lives easier, which I’ll cover below.
In a nutshell, I don’t think you’ll find any other managed WordPress host that offers as many agency-specific features as Flywheel, which is why they’re taking the first spot on this list.
GENERAL HOSTING FEATURES
As a managed WordPress host, Flywheel offer all of the basic managed WordPress features you’d expect, including the following:
- Automatic updates.
- Automatic backups.
- Firewalls and security scans.
- Server-level caching.
- Built-in content delivery network (CDN) from Fastly.
- Staging sites.
- Google Cloud infrastructure.
- 24/7 expert WordPress support.
AGENCY-SPECIFIC FEATURES
Flywheel’s most unique agency feature is their Growth Suite tool, which has replaced their older white-label option.
Growth Suite is one unified interface where you can manage your client’s hosting, subscription billing, and client details. You can also set up other services beyond hosting and bill clients through the Stripe integration.
Clients can also register through your portal to pay bills and view their billing history. And, beyond that, you can send automated reports to clients, such as a run-down of their site’s performance.
In addition to Growth Suite, Flywheel also has an Agency Partners program that offers the following perks:
- Commissions on the hosting you sell to clients (3X the first month’s payment).
- Free hosting for your agency website.
- Priority chat and ticket support.
- Direct access to the account manager.
- Your own listing in the Flywheel Agency Partners Directory.
Having access to both the partners’ program and Growth Suite gives you two ways to monetize your client hosting:
- You can use Growth Suite in a more ‘hosting reseller’ way, where you handle billing via Growth Suite and set your own prices.
- You can use the Agency Partners program in a more ‘affiliate marketing’ way, where you earn a commission for handing off clients to Flywheel.
Finally, Flywheel also offers its own local development tool called Local, which allows for easy deployments directly to Flywheel hosting. You can develop client sites locally using Local, and then push them live when they’re ready to go.
AGENCY-SPECIFIC FEATURES
One of the most unique things about GridPane is it gives you an economy of scale when it comes to your clients’ hosting. With managed WordPress hosting, your cost per client is pretty much always the same. Sure, you can negotiate a better deal, but you’re always going to pay roughly the same price per site. And if a site’s traffic goes up, you’re going to pay a lot more for that site because of visitor limits.
However, with GridPane your costs won’t just start at a lower point — they’ll also go down as you get more clients, which is a really attractive thing for your bottom line because it lets you build strong recurring revenue. You also don’t have to deal with any arbitrary visitor limits.
Beyond that, you get some really useful tools to manage your clients’ sites:
- Integration with DNS Made Easy to manage DNS details for client sites.
- UpdateSafely™ system to automatically apply WordPress updates in a safe manner. It automatically clones a site to staging, applies all of the updates, and then runs a visual comparison of staging vs live to catch issues. If there are no issues, it can then automatically apply the updates on the live server or wait for manual confirmation from you.
- 7G & ModSec 3+ WAF and malware scanning to keep your clients’ sites secure.
- Snapshot Failover hosting for high-availability. If your primary server goes down, GridPane can automatically send traffic to a cloned version of your site on a different server. Great for mission-critical client sites where having downtime isn’t an option.
- Automatic local backups. GridPane used to also offer a remote backup tool, but it’s disabled it because of issues. It may come back in the future, though.