When it comes to hosting, I’m looking for two things: simplicity and quality. I always recommend services that I know website owners will love and find user-friendly. If you’re a freelancer looking to help clients manage quality WordPress hosting, here are three services you should consider.
Before I present my suggestions, I’d like to note a few things. This guide is for freelancers or beginner web designers who are considering offering hosting to their clients—or at least managing their clients’ hosting accounts.
Choice of hosting as a service for freelancers
If you are a creative freelancer, and especially for Web Designers, I recommend you find a quality hosting for WordPress that you can handle and manage yourself. Because in the end, it’s often you who will end up managing the technical things for your clients. And as I mention in the end of this article, I do keep you as a freelancer in mind and how you can build some recurring income to your business.
I recommend you pick one of the following three companies for hosting. But, before you choose, consider who will be working with this hosting service. Is it you or the client?
Or, do you expect that your customer will want to handle some of the hosting account features and technicalities themselves?
Make sure you read the whole article as I provide some additional tips and notes for you that will be essential for handling this for your web design clients. And possibly make an extra recurring income for yourself.
If you are reading this article as a website owner and not a Web Designer doing work for clients, it’s just as useful for you. I will be presenting these hosting companies in the order I recommend them. And it’s in the order of what I suggest a Web Designer should be using.
Cloudways: This is quality hosting for WordPress with advanced features
Cloudways is the first hosting company I will recommend.
They have high-quality hosting for WordPress, intended for someone who wants to start and have control of their own servers. It sounds advanced, but it doesn’t have to be so technical.
This is the hosting company I use myself in my business. I run two accounts: one for my own websites and projects, and one for my premium WordPress hosting service. You can visit us over at WPAlchemy.io to see how we offer this service to our clients.
If you want full control over your WordPress hosting, go for Cloudways, start a server for a low monthly cost, and you can add 10–13 websites on it. It’s quick to install WordPress and set up new websites. Cloudways also features their own caching plugin and is a hosting company with built-in security features. This includes:
- Bot protection
- WordPress vulnerability scans (file and code scan)
- Firewall
Another awesome feature you can add to your account, which is hugely important for many of our customers, is the custom SMTP email sending for WordPress. This feature is connected to the Elastic Email service, which is integrated into the Cloudways add-ons offer.
Cloudways support is amazing, and they never give up on a problem. Support is available 24/7, which feels good when something comes up for client websites.
Note: Cloudways is server hosting only. You cannot register domains or manage DNS here. But you CAN create email accounts through their Rackspace add-on. ($1/m per email)
Spaceship – Modern slick hosting and domain service (All-in-one)
This is my second suggestion on the list. Spaceship has a blend of being a super-slick, modern hosting service and offering advanced features.
I use Spaceship also because it has become a perfect platform to handle all domains, DNS, and email accounts. They also offer hosting packages, everything from typical low-priced shared hosting to advanced VPNs.
They have a fast and modern UI, and the user experience is unlike anything else I have seen with a hosting company. It’s very pleasant to work with.
Spaceship has a sexy feature where I can import DNS values from another provider. So if I do a domain migration for a client, it takes about 30 seconds to import all their DNS settings.
They are also a hosting company with DNS templates, which makes it quick to add common DNS values to domains.
For freelancers and even some agencies, I can recommend Spaceship.com as a full-service package if you want to offer domains, hosting, email, and DNS management for clients.
Dreamhost – Quality WordPress hosting with simpler management
I have used Dreamhost in the past. I can really recommend them, especially if you want a simpler but modern interface to manage domains and hosting.
This is a more straightforward hosting service for WordPress, I would say. You won’t have the same control over server settings as with Cloudways. But for clients, or for freelancers who want to suggest a quality hosting service for WordPress to their clients, I can recommend Dreamhost.
It’s an all-in-one service with domain registration, hosting, email accounts, and some other neat features you can check out yourself.
Their chat support is pretty quick and has always been available for me in the past when I needed some technical help.
Go for Dreamhost if you want simpler hosting. If you do, I recommend you go for the “Shared Unlimited” package so you can register several email accounts and websites without paying extra for those.
Sum-up – Choose the service that fits your hosting skill level
So, as a sum-up and conclusion on what hosting service you could choose:
- Advanced quality hosting for WordPress — Full control with Cloudways
- Flexible domain and hosting — Easy to advanced with Spaceship
- Simpler hosting for regular users and as client suggestions with Dreamhost
One last thing I want to mention to freelancers and small agencies: To create another full service for your customers and build recurring income, go for Cloudways and offer your own hosting package.
Then you bake in the following services:
- Premium fast and secure WordPress hosting
- Monthly maintenance of WordPress system updates
- Nightly backups
- SSL certificate included
- Custom SMTP email sending for WordPress
Charge from $35 to $47 monthly and build up your customer base of quality clients to build a stronger business for yourself. Just be authentic.
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