Agency hosting is not the same purchase as hosting for one site, and most comparison articles never notice the difference. You are not choosing a plan. You are choosing a cost structure that has to survive going from three client sites to thirty, a support model that decides who your client phones at 9pm, and a billing arrangement you can either absorb or pass on.
The number that matters is cost per client site, and it varies from about $3 to about $30 depending on which pricing model you pick rather than which brand. Prices below were checked in August 2026 against each provider’s own pricing page. Hosting prices drift, so confirm before you quote a client.
Disclosure: some links in this article are affiliate links. If you buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change the recommendations, and where a provider is the wrong fit for agency work we say so.
The short answer
| Your situation | Pick | Roughly per site |
|---|---|---|
| Under 5 client sites | Cloudways, one small server | $3 to $6 |
| 5 to 30 ordinary business sites | Cloudways, one or two mid servers | $5 to $12 |
| Premium clients who expect white glove support | Kinsta | $17 to $23 |
| WooCommerce stores with real order volume | Kinsta or a dedicated server | $20 or more |
| You never want to size a server | WP Engine or Pressable | $25 or more |
If you take nothing else from this article: the per server model is dramatically cheaper at volume, and the per site model buys you not having to think about capacity. That trade is the whole decision.
Two pricing models, and why it decides everything
Every host in this category charges one of two ways.
- Per server. You rent a server and host as many client sites on it as it will carry. Cost per site falls as you add clients. Cloudways is the main example. You decide density, which means you also carry the risk of getting it wrong.
- Per site. You pay for each install regardless of how small it is. Cost per site stays flat forever. Kinsta, WP Engine and Pressable work this way. You never think about capacity, and you never benefit from scale either.
At three clients the difference is trivial. At thirty it is the difference between roughly $100 a month and roughly $600. Nothing else in this comparison moves the number that much.
What the main providers cost
| Provider | Model | Entry price | Representative agency tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudways | Per server | $11/mo (2GB, unlimited sites) | $88/mo (8GB, 4 vCPU) |
| Kinsta | Per site | $35/mo (1 site) | $340/mo (Agency 20) |
| WP Engine | Per site | $30/mo (Startup) | $290/mo (Scale) |
| Pressable | Per site tiers | $25/mo (Signature) | $350/mo (Premium) |
| Hostinger | Shared, many sites | $7.99/mo promo, $25.99 renewal | Not recommended for client work |
Hostinger is in the table because agencies ask about it, not because we recommend it for client portfolios. Shared infrastructure across clients means one busy neighbour affects everyone, and it is not something to attach your name and a monthly care plan to. It is a fine place for a client’s first site before there is revenue attached, which is the case we set out in Hostinger versus Kinsta.
Cost per client site, worked properly
This is the table most agencies actually need. Ordinary business and brochure sites, no unusual traffic.
| Client sites | Cloudways | Kinsta | Per site host at $30 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | $11 server, $2.20 each | $115 (WP 5), $23.00 each | $150, $30.00 each |
| 10 | $88 server, $8.80 each | $225 (WP 10), $22.50 each | $300, $30.00 each |
| 20 | $88 server, $4.40 each | $340 (Agency 20), $17.00 each | $600, $30.00 each |
| 40 | Two $88 servers, $4.40 each | $450 (Agency 40), $11.25 each | $1,200, $30.00 each |
Two honest caveats before you take that as gospel. First, the Cloudways column assumes you pack servers sensibly, and a dozen brochure sites on an 8GB four vCPU server is comfortable while thirty is not. Second, it excludes add-ons, which on Cloudways are charged per site or per domain and can double the real figure once you turn on a CDN and malware scanning across a portfolio. We worked that arithmetic honestly in the Cloudways pricing breakdown.
Notice also that Kinsta’s per site cost improves at volume because their agency tiers bundle more installs. The gap narrows from ten times at five sites to about two and a half times at forty. If you assumed managed per site hosting is always ruinous at scale, that is worth revisiting.
What actually matters when you host client sites
Feature lists are mostly noise. Five things genuinely change your working life.
- Staging that people actually use. One click staging and one click push back. If it takes fifteen minutes to spin up, your team will edit production instead, and you will eventually explain to a client why their site broke at lunchtime.
- Backups with fast restores. Everyone advertises daily backups. The question is how long a restore takes and whether you can restore one site without touching the others. Test this before you need it.
- Client access that is not your admin login. Separate logins scoped to one site, so a client’s marketing person can get in without being able to reach anyone else’s site.
- Support that understands WordPress. The difference between a ticket that says “we can see a plugin conflict on line 214” and one that says “please contact your developer” is the difference between a fifteen minute problem and an evening.
- Billing you can pass on. Either you rebill hosting to clients or you absorb it. Hosts that let you rebill cleanly, at cost or with a markup, turn a cost line into a revenue line.
Things that matter less than the marketing suggests: raw benchmark numbers, since a properly cached brochure site is fast on any of these; and free migrations, which are useful once and irrelevant thereafter. The exception is a portfolio move, where migration help genuinely changes the maths, as set out in the portfolio migration playbook.
Choosing a plan by agency stage
Under 5 clients
Buy the smallest sensible server and stop thinking about it. A $11 two gigabyte server carries several brochure sites without complaint. At this stage your constraint is winning clients, not infrastructure, and any time spent optimising hosting spend is time not spent selling.
5 to 20 clients
This is where the per server model earns its keep, and where you should formalise a care plan so hosting is billed rather than absorbed. Move to a mid sized server, keep one client per server only where a site genuinely warrants it, and start monitoring CPU during traffic peaks rather than after complaints.
20 to 50 clients
Split by risk rather than by count. Transactional sites and anything with a marketing budget behind it get headroom or their own server. Brochure sites pack densely. This is also the point where centralised management across the portfolio stops being optional, and where scaling hosting as the agency grows becomes a planning exercise rather than a reaction.
50 or more
Consider whether you are still an agency that hosts or a hosting business that also designs. At this volume white label and reseller arrangements start to make sense commercially, which is a different model with its own economics, covered in white label and reseller hosting for agencies.
Where each provider is genuinely the right answer
- Cloudways when cost per client site is your priority and you are comfortable choosing server sizes. Cheapest per site at every portfolio size, and the reason most agencies land there. You do have to make sizing decisions, and getting them wrong shows up as a slow site rather than a bill.
- Kinsta when your clients are premium and your support burden matters more than your hosting bill. Genuinely excellent support, and the agency tiers narrow the price gap more than people expect. Kinsta’s agency plans start at $340 for twenty sites.
- WP Engine when you want per site simplicity with a long established platform. Priced comparably to Kinsta at the low end.
- Pressable when you are already in the Automattic and WooCommerce ecosystem, where the integration is the argument rather than the price. The full breakdown is in the Pressable pricing article.
For most agencies reading this, the answer is Cloudways on cost grounds, with one or two premium clients moved somewhere with white glove support if their expectations warrant it. That split is more common in practice than committing an entire portfolio to one host.
The mistakes that cost agencies money
- Absorbing hosting instead of billing it. If hosting is invisible in your pricing, clients assume it is free, and you have created a cost that grows with every project you win.
- Putting hosting in the client’s name. It feels generous. It means you cannot move, cannot fix billing, and cannot act in an emergency without chasing someone for a password.
- Packing a store in with brochure sites. A checkout cannot be cached the way a homepage can. One busy store degrades everything sharing that server.
- Choosing on benchmark numbers. Every host in this article is fast enough for a cached business site. Choose on cost structure, support and workflow.
There are more of these, and they are expensive to learn firsthand, so we collected them in the critical hosting mistakes agencies must avoid. If you are choosing hosting for your own projects rather than client work, the criteria shift to tooling, and we cover them in WordPress hosting for developers.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best managed WordPress hosting for agencies?
For most agencies, Cloudways, because per server pricing brings cost per client site into single figures where per site hosts stay flat at $17 to $30. Kinsta is the better answer when clients are premium and support quality matters more than the bill, and its agency tiers narrow the gap at forty sites and above. There is no single right answer, only the right pricing model for your portfolio size.
How much should an agency pay per client site for hosting?
Between $3 and $12 per site on a per server host once you have ten or more clients, and $17 to $30 on per site managed hosting. If you are paying more than $30 a site for ordinary business websites you are either on the wrong model or on a plan sized for traffic you do not have. Bill hosting into a care plan at a healthy multiple of cost.
How many client sites can share one server?
Around a dozen ordinary brochure and small business sites on an 8GB four vCPU server, and you should be watching CPU under load somewhere around twenty. Transactional sites are the exception and deserve headroom or their own server, because a store that slows down costs the client money directly and the support conversation costs you more than the hosting saved.
Is shared hosting ever acceptable for client work?
For a client’s first site before there is revenue attached, yes. For a portfolio you charge a monthly fee to maintain, no. You are sharing resources with strangers, you cannot isolate one client from another, and the support model is not built for someone managing thirty sites. The saving is not worth the first outage.
Should hosting be in my name or the client’s?
Yours, if hosting is part of your service, with it stated plainly in the agreement including what happens if they leave. Accounts in the client’s name mean you cannot move a site, resolve a billing failure or act in an emergency without chasing them. If a client insists on owning it, price your involvement accordingly, because you have taken on the responsibility without the control.
Do free migrations matter when choosing a host?
Only when you are moving a portfolio rather than one site. For a single migration it is a nice extra worth a few hours. For twenty client sites, migration effort is the largest single cost of switching, at roughly two to three hours a site once verification, DNS scheduling and client communication are counted, so an offer that removes it can change a marginal decision into an obvious one.
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