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Top 6 Best WordPress Hosting Services for Designers and Agencies (Providing Hosting for Client Websites) – Compared

Searching for the best WordPress hosting for an agency hosting client websites?

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.

But that adds another important decision to your plate: How do you find the right hosting solution for your client websites?

There are some important hosting features that apply to both individuals and agencies — you always 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.

In this post, I’ve collected the best WordPress hosts targeted towards those needs. That is, these hosts don’t just offer quality hosting products — they also offer features and options well-suited to WordPress agencies or freelancers building client sites.

For each host, I’ll try to highlight what makes it uniquely well-suited to agencies who are hosting client websites.

Let’s dig in…

Best WordPress Agency Hosting Summary Table

If you’re in a rush, here’s a comparison table for the agency WordPress hosting providers from this list. 

This comparison table is for the cheapest agency hosting plan from each provider. Almost all of the providers also offer higher-tier plans with higher limits.

FlywheelRocket.netGridPaneKinstaCloudwaysSiteGround
Starting price per month$135$100$100*$340$10**$40
Websites1010No limits*20No limits**No Limits
Monthly visits100,000UnmeteredNo limits*400,000No limits**~400,000 (est.)
Storage20 GB50 GBNo limits*50 GBNo limits**40 GB
White-label hosting dashboard
Client site transfer
Direct client billing

*GridPane uses a unique approach where you pay one flat fee to the GridPane service, and then you can manage unlimited sites and servers using your own cloud hosting. You’ll also need to pay for the actual cloud hosting servers. More on this below.

**At Cloudways, you pay based on your actual server usage, so you can set things up however you want. You could use a single server for multiple client sites or give each client their own server. More on this below.

Best WordPress Hosting for Agencies, Compared in Detail

Here’s a deeper look at my picks for the six best agency WordPress hosting providers, in no particular order…


1. Flywheel

The Flywheel hosting homepage
The Flywheel hosting homepage.

Flywheel is a popular managed WordPress host that made its name as a WordPress hosting solution for agencies and creative freelancers.

Since its launch, it’s marketed itself more towards freelancers and agencies than individual WordPress users. But more importantly than the marketing copy, it’s 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 it’s taking the first spot on this list, and is one of our overall picks for the best managed WordPress hosting for agencies.

However, before I get to the features, I want to share a quick note:

Flywheel was acquired by WP Engine in 2019. Since that acquisition, its prices have become almost identical. However, Flywheel still has way more agency-focused features, which is why I’m including Flywheel on this list and skipping WP Engine.

WP Engine is still a solid option for WordPress agency hosting in its own right. But if you’re looking at two companies both with identical pricing and both under the same umbrella, you may as well focus your search on the one that has a more agency-focused offering.

💻 General Hosting Features

As a managed WordPress host, Flywheel offers all of the basic managed WordPress features you’d expect, including:

💼 Agency-Specific Features

Flywheel’s most unique agency feature is its Growth Suite tool, which has replaced its older white-label option.

Growth Suite is a 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:

  1. You can use Growth Suite in a more ‘hosting reseller’ way, where you handle billing via Growth Suite and set your own prices.
  2. 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.

💰 Pricing

Flywheel offers two pre-made Growth Suite plans for agencies, as well as an option to make a custom plan by talking to sales.

The two pre-set plans are:

  • Freelance — $135 a month for up to ten sites.
  • Agency — $330 a month for up to 30 sites.

You can view the full limits for each plan below:

Flywheel's plans and limits for WordPress agency hosting
Flywheel’s pricing plans and limits for WordPress agency hosting.

You can learn more in our full Flywheel review here.


2. GridPane

The GridPane homepage
The GridPane homepage.

GridPane isn’t WordPress hosting, per se. Instead, it’s a WordPress-specific control panel designed to pair with cloud hosting from providers such as DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud, and so on.

Essentially, you start with an unmanaged VPS from your preferred cloud hosting provider, let GridPane do its thing, and then you have a performance-optimized, secure server that you can manage from a user-friendly dashboard. 

It’s basically taking the ‘sysadmin’ part out of provisioning and maintaining a cloud VPS. For example, I’m by no means a developer, but I’m still able to use a similar tool to host my own WordPress websites on cloud hosting from Vultr.

While there are other tools in this space, such as RunCloud and SpinupWP, the unique thing about GridPane is it’s specifically designed to help WordPress agencies harness the power of cloud hosting for their client sites. I’ll talk about some of those unique features in the next section.

Additionally, even though GridPane is a server control panel and not a host, you still get 24/7 live support.

Because GridPane’s main focus is on agency WordPress hosting, let’s jump right in to those features.

💼 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 for agencies, 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:

  • PanelPress lets you give clients access to a more limited white-labeled dashboard to manage basic areas of their site, such as backups.
  • 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.
  • Security protections including firewalls (7G and ModSecurity), malware scanner (Maldet + ClamAV), and brute force protection (Fail2Ban).
  • 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 or on-demand local backups, or backups to your own off-site cloud storage, including support for Amazon S3, Backblaze B2 and Wasabi.
  • One-click free SSL certificates and automatic renewals.
  • Staging sites with flexible staging pushes.

💰 Pricing

GridPane itself has three pricing plans, starting at $100 a month.

However, GridPane doesn’t really promote the cheaper $100 Panel plans because they’re not visible on the pricing table. If you’re interested in the Panel plans, you can view details here.

Gridpane Hosting Pricing
The pricing plans for the GridPane service itself (this doesn’t include cloud hosting).

These are flat prices. There are no ‘per site’ fees where you need to pay more to GridPane as your client list grows. Nor do you need to pay GridPane more based on your site’s monthly visit numbers, as most managed WordPress hosts charge (a billing metric that, while simple, doesn’t really make sense).

However, remember you’ll also need to budget for the cloud hosting itself. This will depend entirely on how many servers you need and how many resources you need for each server, which does mean your costs will slightly grow as you increase clients. However, the cost of GridPane itself never increases, so your cost per site is always going down.

If you want to get an idea of what server(s) you’d need for your current situation, I recommend reaching out to GridPane’s support, as they’d be happy to recommend a setup and give you a rough budget for what you should expect to pay.


3. Rocket.net

Rocket.net's agency WordPress hosting page
Rocket.net’s agency WordPress hosting page.

Rocket.net is a newer managed WordPress hosting provider that’s quickly grown, thanks to the unique way in which it builds in Cloudflare Enterprise to its hosting offering.

By default, it caches your site’s full pages on Cloudflare Enterprise’s global network, which means your clients’ sites will load equally fast all around the world.

Rocket.net is also able to offer the other benefits of Cloudflare’s network, such as automatic image optimization, code optimization, a web application firewall, and so on.

Beyond that, Rocket.net offers all of the agency managed WordPress hosting features you’d expect.

In addition to its general managed WordPress hosting plans, Rocket.net offers dedicated agency hosting features, along with white-labeled reseller features if you want to sell hosting directly to clients and build a new revenue stream.

💻 General WordPress Hosting Features

Rocket.net is a true managed WordPress hosting provider, which means you and your clients get all of the ‘standard’ features you’d expect from a managed WordPress host, including:

  • a custom hosting dashboard
  • automatic daily backups with 14-day storage
  • manual on-demand backups
  • free SSL certificates
  • full-page edge caching on Cloudflare
  • two web application firewalls (WAF) — Cloudflare at the network edge and Imunify360 on the server 
  • staging sites.

Rocket.net also offers some unique WordPress hosting features:

  • WordPress activity logging — track WordPress actions without needing to install an activity log plugin (and without needing to bloat sites’ databases).
  • In-browser WP-CLI terminal.
  • Manage plugins/themes from the hosting panel — you can manage existing plugins/themes and install new ones from your hosting panel, which is helpful when working on client sites.

💼 Agency-Specific Features

Rocket.net’s agency managed WordPress hosting plans and reseller features offer a lot of added benefits over its regular managed WordPress hosting plans:

  • White-labeled dashboard — you can fully white-label the Rocket.net dashboard, including customizing the colors, logos and text of the dashboard.
  • Automatic provisioning — if you want to build an even more customized solution, Rocket.net can automatically provision client sites based on an API request. This means you could use your own custom billing system and connect it to Rocket.net via the API.
  • Embed the hosting control panel — you can embed the hosting control panel on any site using HTML/JavaScript. This means you can let clients access their control panels directly from your agency website.
  • Client collaboration via Atarim Rocket.net’s dashboard has an Atarim integration, so you can easily collaborate with clients while building a site.

Overall, Rocket.net’s public reseller API is probably one of the most unique features on this list because it opens up a lot of opportunities for building custom solutions for your agency.

💰 Pricing

Rocket.net’s agency WordPress hosting plans start at $100 a month for the Tier 1 plan, which includes the following:

  • 10 sites.
  • Unmetered visitors.
  • 50 GB storage.
  • 200 GB bandwidth.

The agency plans go all the way up to $1,600 a month for the Tier 10 plan, which includes the following:

  • 200 sites.
  • Unmetered visitors.
  • 375 GB storage.
  • 3,500 GB bandwidth (3.5 TB).

Here’s a screenshot of the first three pricing tiers — you need to go to the pricing page to see all of the plans.

Rocket.net's pricing for agency WordPress hosting
Rocket.net’s pricing for agency WordPress hosting.

4. Kinsta

Kinsta's WordPress agency hosting page.
Kinsta’s WordPress agency hosting page.

Kinsta is another very popular managed WordPress host that make a great option for WordPress agencies. It offers an excellent WordPress hosting product in general, and also has its own Agency Partner Program that builds in a lot of cool new features for agencies.

It also recently started offering full-page caching on Cloudflare’s global network, which lets you implement a similar approach to the Rocket.net hosting plans above.

All in all, Kinsta is a solid option if you like managed WordPress hosting and you don’t need the above-and-beyond agency features Flywheel offers, such as Growth Suite.

💻 General WordPress Hosting Features

In terms of the hosting itself, you’ll get a stellar list of managed WordPress features, including the following:

  • A custom MyKinsta dashboard.
  • Full-page edge caching on Cloudflare Enterprise.
  • Built-in code optimization and image optimization, powered by Cloudflare.
  • Automatic updates.
  • Automatic backups.
  • Free SSL certificates.
  • Google Cloud infrastructure and 35+ global server locations. You can choose a different server location on a per-site basis, which is useful for agencies with clients in different locations.
  • Firewalls and security scans.
  • Server-level caching via Nginx.
  • Staging sites.
  • A free application performance monitoring tool — Kinsta APM.
  • 24/7 expert WordPress support.

💼 Agency-Specific Features

In April 2021, Kinsta launched its own Agency Partner Program that comes with a few perks for agencies:

  • Free hosting for your agency site — you can get free hosting on Kinsta’s Pro plan.
  • White-labeled caching — you can white-label the cache plugin that appears in your clients’ WordPress dashboards. You can replace the text with your own company and also replace the Kinsta logo with your own.

Kinsta also offers solid user access control to its custom MyKinsta dashboard. You can give clients full access to just their own site(s) and you can also control the access of collaborators on your own team (e.g. developers who may only need access to certain sites).

Kinsta doesn’t currently offer billing transfer, which is a negative. However, you can transfer sites to other Kinsta accounts, which would let you hand off a site to a client’s personal account if needed. This would also let you use the Kinsta affiliate program to refer your clients to Kinsta, which offers ongoing recurring commissions.

Finally, Kinsta also offers its own WordPress local development tool called DevKinsta. Like Flywheel’s Local tool, DevKinsta includes a special goodie for Kinsta users that lets you push a site from your local development environment to your hosted Kinsta staging site with just a few clicks.

This offers really smooth development workflows for creating client sites with Kinsta.

💰 Pricing

As part of Kinsta’s Agency Partner Program, it’s created three dedicated pricing plans for agencies. In addition to these plans, you can also reach out to sales for a custom plan.

Each plan has different limits when it comes to the number of sites, the monthly visits and the storage you have access to. There are no bandwidth limits in general, but there is a bandwidth limit for the bundled CDN if you want to use that.

Kinsta agency pricing
Kinsta’s agency pricing plans.

These plans are almost identical to Kinsta’s existing Business 3, Business 4 and Enterprise 1 plans. However, one difference is that all of the agency plans include 30-day backup retention, whereas the consumer-focused plans only offer shorter 14 or 20-day retention. Other than that, though, the actual website and resource limits are pretty much identical.

You can learn more in our full Kinsta review here.


5. SiteGround

SiteGround's agency hosting page
SiteGround’s agency hosting page.

SiteGround is a more budget-friendly WordPress host that has a much-improved agency offering thanks to its new custom Site Tools dashboard.

With the new Site Tools dashboard, you can white-label the hosting dashboard and give your clients access to individual sites. You can also add users as collaborators (e.g. a developer on your team) and choose which sites they have access to.

Overall, I wouldn’t put SiteGround in the same tier as the other options on this list. However, if you have a small agency and/or you want to keep your costs down, SiteGround can be a solid option, especially if your clients’ sites are mostly low-traffic.

💻 General WordPress Hosting Features

All of SiteGround’s agency-ready plans come with the following basic hosting features:

  • Automatic updates.
  • Automatic backups.
  • Firewalls and security scans.
  • Server-level caching.
  • Free SiteGround Optimizer plugin to implement WordPress performance best practices.
  • Free SiteGround Security plugin to implement basic security hardening.
  • Staging sites.
  • 24/7 expert WordPress support.

💼 Agency-Specific Features

As I mentioned in the intro, one of the best agency features is the ability to white-label the hosting dashboard. You can completely replace SiteGround’s branding with your own to create your own custom dashboard experience for clients.

You’ll also get features to add clients or collaborators, and control which sites they have access to. There’s even a dedicated client role. Or, with SiteGround’s cloud hosting plans, you can create your own custom roles.

Alternatively, instead of giving clients access to your own white-labeled hosting dashboard, you can also transfer sites directly to your client’s own SiteGround account.

💰 Pricing

To use all of SiteGround’s agency-focused features, you’ll need either the GoGeek plan or one of SiteGround’s cloud hosting plans. SiteGround does also advertise the GrowBig plan on its agency hosting page, but the GrowBig plan doesn’t include essential WordPress agency hosting features, such as the white-labeled dashboard option.

The GoGeek plan starts at $10.69 a month with promo pricing (your first billing cycle) and $39.99 a month after that. Make sure you factor in the full price renewal ($39.99) when making your decision.

You can also use SiteGround’s cloud hosting plans for agency hosting, and these start at $100 a month for:

  • 4 CPU cores
  • 8 GB memory
  • 40 GB SSD storage.
SiteGround's agency pricing plans.
SiteGround’s agency pricing plans.

You can learn more in our full SiteGround review here.


6. Cloudways

The Cloudways agency partnership program homepage
The Cloudways agency partnership program homepage.

Cloudways is another excellent WordPress agency hosting provider that uses a similar approach to the GridPane solution above.

That is, Cloudways doesn’t offer its own hosting — you choose your preferred cloud hosting from five options of DigitalOcean*, AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr and Linode.

From there, Cloudways handles everything about configuring that server to host WordPress sites, and you can manage everything from a user-friendly dashboard.

However, Cloudways is also very different from GridPane in two ways:

  1. Cloudways doesn’t offer a flat fee to manage unlimited servers. Instead, you’ll pay a variable markup for each server that you purchase. For example, if the server costs $5 when purchasing it directly from DigitalOcean, you might pay $10 all-in at Cloudways. This markup goes down as server resources increase.
  2. You don’t get root access to the cloud servers nor do you need to purchase the cloud hosting separately.

*Note: Cloudways was acquired by DigitalOcean in 2022. However, it doesn’t seem to have any plans to limit which cloud hosting provider you choose.

💻 General WordPress Hosting Features

While Cloudways isn’t a true managed WordPress host like Flywheel, Kinsta or Rocket.net, it does still offer a lot of convenient features that you’d find at managed WordPress hosts, including the following:

  • Server-level caching options, including Varnish, Nginx, Memcached and Redis.
  • Free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt (one-click enable and automatic renewals).
  • A dedicated staging tool, along with a general site cloning feature.
  • Cloudflare Enterprise integration for improved performance and security.
  • Automatic off-site backups on any schedule (extra fee — $0.033 per GB).
  • On-demand backups when needed.
  • Lots of useful add-ons for SMTP, email hosting via Rackspace, and more.

Cloudways also offers a WordPress SafeUpdates feature that uses visual regression testing when automatically updating the core, plugins or themes. If the Cloudways SafeUpdates tool detects an issue, it can automatically roll back the change.

While this is helpful for all WordPress users, this feature is especially great for agencies because it lets you save time while still making sure updates don’t break your clients’ sites.

💼 Agency-Specific Features

While Cloudways doesn’t offer any dedicated reseller hosting plans, its basic setup and affiliate program already works well for agencies. 

You can spin up a new server for each one of your clients, or you can host multiple clients on a single server. You can also mix and match the approaches. For example, you could give a client with a high-resource site their own server while having low-resource client sites share a single server.

If you don’t want to bill clients directly, you can also have them purchase hosting via your affiliate link. Cloudways offers a lifetime affiliate commission option, so you can earn for the life of the client.

Cloudways also offers an agency partnership program that comes with special benefits to agencies.

There are different tiers that are based on your agency’s Cloudways spending, and the benefits include more comprehensive support, a dedicated partnership manager, co-marketing opportunities, and more.

💰 Pricing

Cloudways doesn’t have any special pricing for agencies — you’ll just pay based on the cloud provider and server resources.

This means you can set things up however you want. Again, you could purchase a separate server for each client or you could put multiple client sites on a single server.

You can go to the Cloudways pricing page to see all of your options. The prices you see include both the cloud provider’s fee and Cloudways’s fee — there’s no need to purchase cloud hosting directly like you would with GridPane.

To give you an idea, here are the prices for the premium DigitalOcean droplets:

The pricing for premium DigitalOcean droplets
The pricing for premium DigitalOcean droplets.

Which Is the Best WordPress Hosting for Agencies?

The best hosting for your WordPress agency depends on the solution you’re looking for.

The main questions I see are these:

  1. Are you looking for a client hosting solution that’s 100% hands-off?
  2. Are you looking to earn more money from your client hosting and/or get more control over the technical details?

Obviously, the ideal solution is both, and there’s some overlap between the two, but the one you value most should affect your decision.


The Hands-Off, Managed Approach

If you want a client hosting solution that’s 100% hands-off, that means you probably want to go managed WordPress hosting. And, when it comes to managed WordPress hosting for agencies, Flywheel or Rocket.net are probably your best options.

While most managed WordPress hosts cater to agencies in some respect, Flywheel built its business on this angle, which shows in its suite of agency-focused tools. It’s hard to find any other host that can compete with Flywheel’s Growth Suite for agencies.

Growth Suite makes it easy to handle all parts of your agency’s hosting efforts. You’ll get client management, easy billing, reports to see your recurring revenue, and more. Basically, it’s top-notch if your goal is to simplify your hosting and create a great experience for your clients. Or, you can also just use the Agency Partner program and hand off clients to Flywheel’s care, with the added bonus of a nice commission.

While Rocket.net is a younger host than Flywheel, it’s already built another great agency offering. Beyond just offering excellent hosting, powered by full-page caching on Cloudflare’s network, Rocket.net has built some really great tools.

You can fully white-label the dashboard, and even embed it directly into your own agency site. If you want an even more custom solution, Rocket.net’s public API opens up even more flexibility for your agency.


The More DIY Approach with Lower Costs

If you want to earn more money from your client hosting, while also retaining control, the best option is GridPane. Simply put, you won’t ever get the same economies of scale with a managed WordPress host that you can get with GridPane. GridPane will cost a lot less and still get you blazing-fast performance. Your costs will also go down the more client sites you host, which puts more money in your pocket.

What GridPane won’t get you, though, is the completely hands-off nature of a managed WordPress host. While GridPane has been pretty rock-solid in my testing of it, you’re still taking on more personal responsibility for your clients’ sites than you would with a managed WordPress host.

With that being said, you do still get useful tools, such as that safe updates tool, high-availability options and more, so it’s still a million times easier than trying to run your own stack on cloud hosting.


To sum up…

While the other hosts all offer value as well, I’d say the following overall:

  • Flywheel or Rocket.net if you want something totally hands-off that will simplify your life enormously.
  • GridPane if you want to get economies of scale and earn more money (and are willing to take on some extra responsibility).

FAQs about WordPress Hosting for Agencies

How much should web agencies charge for hosting?

There’s no fixed rate because the hosting costs will depend on the specific client site. However, in general, you want to leave yourself enough room to make a profit, as this will let you build a positive recurring revenue stream, even after you deliver the site to your client.

What’s the best way for agencies to host client websites?

If you want the most hands-off way to host client websites, you should use managed WordPress hosting such as Flywheel or Rocket.net. If you want the most flexibility and best cost structure, you should consider a server control panel such as GridPane.

How can agencies bill clients for hosting?

Some hosting providers, such as Flywheel and Rocket.net, offer tools to help you to bill clients directly. Otherwise, you’ll need to set up your own invoicing and payment system, or you could consider finding a way to integrate WHMCS into your stack.

Related Reading:

Still have questions about picking the right WordPress hosting for your agency or freelance business? Give us a shout in the comments below!

By Colin Newcomer

Colin Newcomer is a freelance writer and long-time Internet marketer. He specializes in digital marketing and WordPress. He lives a life of danger, riding a scooter through the chaos of Hanoi.
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