So you’ve decided you want to offer managed hosting to all of your clients? Great! Now, it’s time to get it set up. I’m going to walk you through what you need to do to create a managed hosting setup that is efficient and effective to offer to your clients. Let’s take a look at the things to consider.
Choose your hosting
There are two different options you have for hosting. You can either purchase a cloud server through a service like AWS, Cloudways, or Digital Ocean, and then host all your clients’ sites on it. This option will take a little more effort on your part because you will need to still take care of your client’s backups and updates; but it will also be a little cheaper. The other option is to resell another managed hosting provider who will take care of all of that for you. This option will be more hands off for you but; it will be a little more expensive.
Choose who you want to host with
Now that you know what kind of hosting you want to use, next you’ll want to pick which provider you’ll want to sign up with. If you want to purchase a regular hosting and do all the maintenance yourself, I prefer Cloudways or Siteground. If you would like to resell another provider’s managed hosting, I prefer Flywheel or I can take care of it for you.
Maintenance Process
Once you have your hosting set up, you will need to be able to take care of all the backups and updates easily. It’s a good idea to have a process set up to help with this. Even if you are going with a managed hosting provider, it’s still a good idea to have off-site backups just in case something goes wrong.
For something like this, I like to set up BackWPUp and have it automatically run backups and send them off site to my Google Drive or Dropbox account. For updates, I set up MainWP on all my sites so that I can easily run updates on all of them at once. The key to successfully running all the updates at once is to make sure you check the sites after you run updates…just to make sure nothing broke in the process.
Reporting
If you are offering managed hosting to your clients, it’s easy to add reporting as an added bonus. If you are already using MainWP to run all your updates, you’re in luck! You can have it automatically configured to send updates to your clients on a monthly basis to include all the updates and changes you’ve made to their site in the last month. You can also include their Google Analytics and any other metrics they want to track in the report.
And that’s it, you should now have your managed hosting setup and ready to take on new clients.
If you don’t want to take care of this yourself but want to still offer managed hosting to your clients, reach out and let me know. I offer white-label managed hosting for agencies so you can still offer the service but not have to worry about the details.
