Agency hosting is a different problem from personal hosting, and the reason is arithmetic. When you host one site, you optimise for price. When you host thirty client sites, you optimise for cost per site, client isolation, and how much of your week the hosting consumes — and those three things rarely point at the same provider.
This page compares the options on those terms, using published pricing. It is a facet of our main web hosting comparison, narrowed to the case where the sites are not yours.
Executive Answer
- Lowest cost per site: reseller hosting. GreenGeeks’ twenty-five-account plan works out around $1.40 per site per month at the renewal rate — nothing else here is close.
- Best balance of cost and hands-off management: Cloudways. Per-server pricing with unlimited sites means each additional client costs you nothing in licence terms.
- Most legible growth path: WPX. Published tiers from five sites to two hundred, with no promotional-to-renewal cliff to explain to a client.
- When the client’s site is the business: Kinsta. You are buying support and performance, and billing it onward.
- Avoid stacking individual shared plans, one per client. It is the most expensive way to reach any site count above three, and the most tedious to administer.
The Only Number That Matters: Cost Per Site
Here is what fifteen client sites cost per month on each model, using published rates. Reseller and shared figures use renewal pricing, because an agency relationship lasts longer than a promotional term.
| Approach | Plan | Monthly | Sites | Per site |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reseller | GreenGeeks RH-25 (renewal) | $34.95 | 25 | $1.40 |
| Reseller | GreenGeeks RH-50 (renewal) | $49.95 | 50 | $1.00 |
| Managed WordPress | WPX Professional (annual) | $49.99 | 15 | $3.33 |
| Managed WordPress | WPX Agency (annual) | $499.99 | 200 | $2.50 |
| Stacked shared plans | 15 × Hostinger (renewal) | $164.85 | 15 | $10.99 |
| Stacked shared plans | 15 × GreenGeeks Lite (renewal) | $209.25 | 15 | $13.95 |
The spread is roughly tenfold between the best and worst way of reaching the same site count. Stacking individual shared plans is the default that agencies drift into — one client signs up, then another, each on their own account — and it is comfortably the most expensive path available.
Cloudways is deliberately absent from that table, and the reason is honesty: Cloudways prices per server, from $11 per month for the smallest DigitalOcean-backed instance, and a server that size will not host fifteen production sites well. The correct Cloudways figure depends on how much resource you provision, so anyone quoting you a neat per-site number for it is guessing. What is true and useful is the shape of the pricing — adding a client adds resource consumption, not a licence fee — which is why Cloudways gets cheaper per site as you grow while shared plans stay flat.
Model your own portfolio
Renewal rates for reseller and shared plans; annual-term rates for WPX. The calculator steps each provider up to the cheapest published plan that fits your site count.
Drag it to three sites and then to thirty. At the low end the differences are pocket change and you should choose on convenience. At the high end the annual gap between the best and worst option runs into thousands, and it stops being a preference.
Cost Is Not the Whole Decision
If cost per site were the only criterion, every agency would run reseller hosting and this page would be one paragraph long. Four other factors decide it.
Client isolation
On reseller hosting each client gets a separate cPanel account, which means separate credentials, separate quotas and a clean handover if the relationship ends. On a single Cloudways server your clients’ sites are neighbours — fine when you control every site, awkward when a client asks for their own access or wants to take the site elsewhere. Ask yourself how a client leaves before you pick the architecture, not after.
Who gets the support ticket
This is the item agencies underprice. On reseller hosting, you are the support desk — the client emails you, and you either fix it or escalate. On Kinsta, there is a WordPress-literate team behind you, which is a real part of what the premium buys and can be billed onward as a managed-hosting line item. Work out what an hour of your time is worth, multiply by the tickets you expect, and the gap between $1.40 and $30 per site starts looking different.
What happens when a client site spikes
On shared and reseller plans, resource limits are enforced — a client’s traffic surge gets throttled. On Kinsta, overages are billed rather than capped, so the site stays up and the invoice grows. Neither behaviour is wrong, but they fail in opposite directions, and you want to know which one you have signed up for before a client’s campaign goes live.
Email, again
Cloudways has no built-in email hosting. Agencies hit this immediately, because clients assume hosting includes mail. Reseller platforms built on cPanel generally do include it. If you are quoting a client an all-in monthly figure, this is the line item most likely to be missing from it.
The Options, In Detail
Cloudways — the default for good reasons
Per-server pricing with unlimited sites and unlimited traffic is close to purpose-built for an agency. Each new client consumes resource rather than triggering a new bill, and the management layer means you are not patching servers on a Friday night. From $11 per month for the smallest DigitalOcean-backed instance, with four other infrastructure providers available.
Two constraints matter here specifically. No root access — if a client needs server-level configuration, you cannot deliver it on this platform at any tier. And no email, as above. Full Cloudways review.
WPX — the cleanest tiers
Business covers five sites, Professional fifteen, Elite thirty-five, and Agency two hundred at $499.99 monthly on an annual term. Every step is published, and there is no promotional rate that expires — which matters when you are the one explaining a price increase to a client.
WordPress only. If your client roster includes anything else, this covers part of your portfolio and you will need a second arrangement for the rest. Full WPX review.
GreenGeeks reseller — cheapest per site
Twenty-five cPanel accounts at $34.95 renewal, fifty at $49.95, eighty at $69.95. Nothing else here approaches $1.00–$1.40 per site, and each client is genuinely separated.
What you are taking on is the support relationship and a good deal of the administration. Reseller hosting is a business model as much as a product — it works when you are actively reselling hosting as a line item, and it works badly when you simply wanted somewhere cheap to park client sites. Full GreenGeeks review.
Kinsta — for the sites that earn
From $30 per month per site on an annual term. On pure cost per site this is the most expensive option on the page by an order of magnitude, and for a brochure site it is impossible to justify.
For a client whose site generates revenue, the calculation inverts: the hosting is a fraction of what an hour of downtime costs, the support team absorbs work that would otherwise be yours, and the whole thing is billable. Use it selectively, for the clients where it is true. Full Kinsta review.
DigitalOcean — only if you have an ops person
At $4 per month for a basic droplet, DigitalOcean is the cheapest infrastructure available, and for an agency with genuine systems expertise it is a legitimate foundation. Without that expertise it is a liability with someone else’s business on it. Backups are a paid add-on that is off by default — on client work, that is not an acceptable default. Full DigitalOcean review.
How to Choose
- Are you reselling hosting as a billed line item? If yes, reseller hosting is built for exactly that and nothing beats it on cost.
- Do you have systems expertise in-house? If no, rule out DigitalOcean regardless of price.
- Is every client site WordPress? If yes, WPX’s tiers are the most predictable. If no, Cloudways handles a mixed roster.
- Do any clients need root access? That single requirement rules out Cloudways, whatever else recommends it.
- Which clients actually generate revenue? Put those on Kinsta and bill it onward. Do not put the whole roster there.
Most agencies past a certain size end up running two of these rather than one: a cheap tier for brochure sites and a premium tier for the clients who matter. That is not indecision — it is correct, because the requirements genuinely differ.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is reseller hosting?
Reseller hosting sells you a block of hosting accounts — typically cPanel accounts — that you allocate to clients under your own brand. GreenGeeks’ RH-25 provides twenty-five accounts with 60GB of storage for $19.95 promotional and $34.95 at renewal. You handle client support; the host handles the servers.
Can I host client sites on a normal shared plan?
Sometimes, if the plan permits unlimited sites — GreenGeeks Pro does. But every client shares one account, meaning shared credentials, no per-client quotas, and a messy separation when someone leaves. It is workable for two or three sites you fully control and a growing problem after that.
How much should I charge clients for hosting?
That is your commercial decision, but the inputs are: your cost per site from the table above, plus a realistic estimate of support time. Agencies that lose money on hosting almost always did so by pricing the plan and forgetting the tickets.
Is white labelling worth paying for?
It depends entirely on whether the client ever sees the hosting interface. If you manage everything and the client only sees their site, branding on a dashboard they never open is worth nothing. If you are handing over logins, it matters.
How We Assessed These
All prices come from each provider’s published pricing at the time of writing. Reseller and shared figures use renewal rates rather than promotional rates, because agency relationships outlast the first term and quoting a client from a promotional price creates a problem twelve months out.
Where a per-site cost could not be honestly derived — Cloudways, whose pricing depends on provisioned resource rather than site count — we say so instead of estimating. Disclosure: no host on this page is linked through an affiliate relationship.
Related
- Best web hosting — the full comparison, including the renewal-cost analysis
- Cloudways review · WPX review · Kinsta review