Most agencies charge clients $50-$150 a month for hosting billed on its own, and $150-$500 a month when hosting sits inside a care plan, with WooCommerce stores at the top of that range. Your number should cover your wholesale hosting cost, the hours you spend on the site, the risk you carry when it breaks, and a margin on top.
How much should you charge clients for hosting?
Price hosting from four numbers: what the hosting costs you wholesale, the hours you spend on that site in an average month, a reserve for the cleanup you will end up doing for free when something breaks, and your margin. For most agencies that lands between $50 and $150 a month billed alone, and higher once it is bundled.
We haven't found an industry survey on agency hosting prices worth citing. The ranges below come from agency proposals and published care plan pages, so use them to sanity-check your own math.
| Site type | Hosting billed alone | Hosting inside a care plan | What pushes the price up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brochure site, 5-15 pages | $35-$75/mo | $100-$200/mo | Backups, updates, uptime checks |
| Lead-gen site with forms and tracking | $75-$150/mo | $150-$350/mo | Form delivery, speed, tag hygiene |
| WooCommerce store | $150-$300/mo | $300-$800/mo | Checkout uptime, payment scope, peak traffic |
| Membership or course site | $150-$300/mo | $300-$700/mo | Logged-in traffic, user data, uncached pages |
Here's the formula with real inputs for a lead-gen site. Wholesale managed hosting costs $89. You spend about 30 minutes a month on it between updates, a form check and the odd client email, and at a $100 blended rate that's $50. Set aside $15 a month as an incident reserve, because one hacked plugin or one broken checkout will eat three or four unbilled hours sooner or later. That puts your cost at $154, and a client price of $175-$195 gives you a margin that survives a bad month.
If your current hosting line is $25 because that's what you set in 2019, the formula usually shows you're paying the client to host their site. Speed belongs in the price as well. Deloitte's "Milliseconds Make Millions" study found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed lifted retail conversions by 8.4% (2020), and clients who sell anything online will recognize that number.
The full care plan side of this, with tiers and inclusions, is covered on our WordPress care plans page and in the care plan pricing guide with real numbers. This post sticks to the hosting line.
Should hosting be bundled into a care plan or billed alone?
Bundle hosting into a care plan for most clients. A standalone hosting line invites a line-by-line comparison against a $10 retail plan, and on price alone you lose that comparison every time. Bill hosting separately when a client buys development by the project, wants the cheapest possible tier, or insists on owning the hosting account.
| Hosting as its own line | Hosting inside a care plan | |
|---|---|---|
| What the client sees | Your $150 next to GoDaddy's $10 | One fee tied to the site staying up and current |
| How easy it is to compare | Very easy, which works against you | Hard, because nothing on retail hosts lines up |
| Typical price | $50-$150/mo | $150-$500/mo |
| Where your margin comes from | Hosting markup only | Hosting markup plus labor |
| What happens when the client cuts costs | They move hosting and the line disappears | Leaving means losing the whole service |
| Best for | Project clients, owner-managed accounts | Most small business clients |
The bundled model also changes how renewal conversations go. When the client is paying for "your site stays fast, patched and backed up, and you have someone to call," the hosting provider underneath is your problem to choose. When they're paying for "hosting," they feel entitled to shop it.
One hybrid that works: list hosting as a component inside the plan description with no separate price beside it. The client sees it's included, and nothing on the page gives them a number to compare. Juniper Web Studio used a care plan structure like this to turn 28 neglected client sites into $2,900 a month in recurring profit, and the hosting was one ingredient of that plan.
How to answer the client who says GoDaddy is $10 a month
Don't argue with the $10. Agree that GoDaddy sells server space for about that, then list what your fee covers that the $10 plan leaves to the client: backups you have restored before, malware cleanup, tested updates, monitoring, and a person who picks up when the site is down. Then ask who they want doing that work.
The email usually arrives after a nephew, a Facebook ad or a renewal reminder. It reads something like: "Just saw GoDaddy has WordPress hosting for $9.99. Why are we paying you $175?"
Three facts help. First, that price is almost always an introductory rate on a multi-year prepay, and it renews higher. We've written about why hosting bills double at renewal if you want examples to point to. Second, the base plan rarely includes what a business site needs, which is why we argued that most GoDaddy add-ons should be in the base price. Third, the plan doesn't include anyone's time.
That third point is the one that matters. According to Patchstack's State of WordPress Security report, 7,966 new vulnerabilities were disclosed in the WordPress ecosystem in 2024, and 96% of them were in plugins (2025). A $10 plan gives the client a server. It doesn't test the plugin update before it goes live, and it doesn't clean the site when one of those vulnerabilities gets used against it.
A reply you can adapt:
You're right that GoDaddy's entry plan is around $10 a month, and for a hobby site it's fine. Our $175 covers the hosting plus the work around it: daily backups we can restore, security monitoring and malware cleanup, plugin and core updates tested before they go live, uptime monitoring, and us picking up the phone if the site goes down. If you moved to the $10 plan, that work would come back to you or to us at our hourly rate. Happy to walk through the numbers on a call.
Keep the tone friendly. The client isn't accusing you of anything; they're checking whether the money is earning its keep. If they still want to move, let them, and offer the work as hourly support. The client who leaves over $165 a month is rarely the one who pays on time for emergency cleanup, and it helps to have the agency's first-hour responsibilities after a hack written into your contract before that call ever comes.
If the client wants a neutral explainer to read on their own, send them our page on what managed WordPress hosting covers. It reads better coming from a third party than from the person sending the invoice.
How hosting margin grows as you add client sites
Hosting margin grows two ways as you add sites. Your wholesale cost per site falls, because managed hosts like TopSyde lower per-site rates as you add sites. Your own time per site falls too, because the tenth site on one platform takes less attention than the first. The client's price stays where it is, so the gap widens.
Here's the conservative version, with every site billed at the $89 starting rate and a $175 client price:
| Client sites | Client revenue/mo at $175 | Wholesale at $89/site | Gross hosting margin/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | $875 | $445 | $430 |
| 15 | $2,625 | $1,335 | $1,290 |
| 30 | $5,250 | $2,670 | $2,580 |
That table is the worst case. It holds the starting rate flat for every site, and in practice the per-site rate drops as your account grows, so the wholesale column at 15 and 30 sites comes in lower and the margin column comes in higher. The exact rate depends on your mix of sites, which is why we quote it on the agency page instead of in a blog post.
The time side matters as much as the markup. An agency running its own VPS or a mix of client-owned hosting accounts spends hours a month on server patches, login juggling and "whose account is this on?" emails. We broke that down in what DIY WordPress hosting costs an agency every month. Every one of those hours you get back is billable somewhere else, and that never shows up in the margin table.
White-label hosting is what makes this work commercially. TopSyde runs the hosting, security and support behind your brand, so the client sees your agency on the invoice and the portal while the margin stays with you. For how to put it in a proposal and what agencies typically mark up, see how agencies add recurring revenue with white-label hosting.
When should an agency raise its hosting price?
Raise hosting prices with 60 days' written notice, a specific reason, and something the client can see has changed. A $20-$40 monthly increase tied to new inclusions is easier for a client to accept than a bare number, and the clients who push back hardest were usually comparing you to a retail host already.
Good reasons are concrete. Your wholesale cost went up, you added malware removal to the plan, you now handle a set number of small content edits each month, or you moved everyone to a platform with faster site-down response. A vague "rising costs" line gets read as a cash grab.
Be careful with the clients you have. According to Bain & Company research summarized in Harvard Business Review, a 5% increase in customer retention can raise profits by 25% to 95% (2014). Winning a replacement client costs far more than keeping the current one, as anyone who has read our notes on web agency client acquisition in 2026 knows. Price increases are worth doing, but they should never be the reason a good client starts shopping.
A sequence that works for most agencies:
- Pick one date a year for price changes and stick to it, so clients expect it.
- Send the notice 60 days out, with the new price and two or three things the plan now covers.
- Offer existing clients a lower increase than new clients pay for the same tier.
- Update your proposal template the same day, so new clients start at the new rate.
The additions are easier to list when your hosting platform ships them. On TopSyde, every site includes AI edits for small content changes (ten a month, previewed before they go live, undoable for 30 days), TopSyde Sentinel for AI malware detection and removal, and the site-down promise on our SLA page: a site-down ticket is answered within 15 minutes, 24/7. Under white-label, those show up as your agency's service.
What does white-label hosting cost an agency?
TopSyde white-label hosting starts at $89/mo per site, and per-site rates drop as you add sites. That price covers managed hosting, TopSyde Sentinel malware detection and removal, backups, monitoring, and support that answers in under 2 hours during business hours. You set the client price, and the client sees your brand.
The full list of what each site gets is on the spec sheet, and the starting price is on our pricing page. For agencies, the useful exercise is to take three of your current client sites, plug your real hours and your current client price into the formula from the first section, and see where the margin lands at $89 wholesale before any volume reduction.
If you'd rather see the numbers than model them, start a 30-day free trial on one client site from our agency page. We'll migrate it, you keep billing the client as normal, and you'll know within a month whether the hours you get back are worth more than the line item.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it normal for agencies to mark up hosting?
Yes. Reselling hosting at a markup is standard across agencies, the same way a contractor marks up materials. Clients pay for the management, the support and the accountability that come with it, and most never ask what the wholesale cost is if the service is good.
Should I let clients pay their host directly instead?
You can, but you lose the margin and usually keep the work, because the client will still call you when the site breaks. If a client insists on owning the account, bill your management time separately at a rate that covers the extra friction of working inside someone else's hosting.
How often should I raise my hosting prices?
Once a year at most, on a fixed date clients know about. Pair each increase with something specific the plan now includes, and give existing clients 60 days' notice and a smaller increase than new clients pay.
What do I do if a client moves to a cheaper host anyway?
Hand over the site cleanly with credentials and a backup, and offer hourly support for future fixes. Put in writing that security, backups and updates are now their host's responsibility, so the agency isn't blamed for a breach on a server it no longer manages.
What is a good margin on client hosting?
Many agencies aim to at least double their wholesale cost once their own time is included, so a site costing $89 wholesale is often billed at $175 or more. Margin per site grows over time because per-site wholesale rates drop as you add sites, while the client's price stays the same.
Content & SEO Strategist
7+ years SEO & content strategy, Google Analytics certified
Elena drives content strategy and SEO at TopSyde, helping clients maximize organic visibility and AI search presence. She combines technical WordPress knowledge with data-driven content optimization.
