Hosting client sites is recurring revenue and recurring liability. The three models, what each costs at ten and fifty sites, and the support burden nobody prices in.
Every web designer eventually faces this. Clients want you to "handle the hosting", it is attractive recurring revenue at healthy margins, and it means you can actually fix things instead of negotiating with someone else's support desk. It also means you are now a hosting company, with a phone that rings when a site is down.
The three models
1. Reseller platform. You buy a reseller account, create isolated hosting accounts for each client, brand it as your own, and the provider handles all infrastructure. Highest cost per site, lowest operational burden.
2. Multi-site on your own VPS. One server, many sites, full control, cheapest per site — and you are the sysadmin, the security team and the on-call engineer.
3. Referral. Client buys hosting in their own name, you get access. No revenue, no liability, no 2am calls. Underrated.
What each costs
| 10 client sites | 50 client sites | Your ongoing work | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20i reseller | ~£20/mo | ~£40/mo | Client accounts only |
| Krystal reseller | ~£25/mo | ~£60/mo | Client accounts only |
| Cloudways | ~£40/mo (2 servers) | ~£150/mo | Server sizing, some tuning |
| Hetzner + your own stack | ~£10/mo | ~£30/mo | Everything |
If you charge clients £15–£25/month each — which is entirely normal and includes your maintenance time — ten sites is £150–£250/month of revenue against £20 of cost. The margin is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what you have agreed to do for it.
20i is the strongest UK reseller platform
Built by the team that ran Heart Internet's reseller business, and it shows. White-labelled nameservers, per-client isolation, bulk operations across every site you manage, a genuinely usable API, and a management view designed for someone holding forty accounts rather than one. Unlimited websites on most plans means side projects and staging sites cost nothing extra.
The panel is its own thing and there is no cPanel familiarity to lean on — which cuts both ways, since clients who never learned cPanel find My20i no harder.
Krystal is the one to choose on support
Slightly more expensive, and what you are buying is the thing that determines whether reselling is pleasant or miserable: when you escalate, you get a competent UK engineer quickly. Every hour of a client outage you spend waiting on a support queue is an hour you cannot bill and cannot explain away. Krystal's 60-day refund window also makes trialling it low-risk.
The case against your own VPS
Fifty sites on one Hetzner box is £30/month against maybe £120 on a reseller platform. It is also fifty sites that go down together when you get the nginx config wrong, fifty sites whose PHP version you must coordinate, and a security perimeter you personally own. The isolation point is the sharp one: on a shared VPS without proper separation, one compromised client site can reach the others. On a reseller platform, accounts are isolated by the provider.
Do it if server administration is a skill you have and want. Do not do it to save £90/month while learning on client sites.
The liability people forget to price
- You are the support desk now. Not the host. Clients will phone you about email on their phone, a form that stopped sending, and a WordPress update that broke a layout — all at once, on a Friday.
- Updates are your job. Fifty WordPress installs need core, plugin and theme updates. Automate it (WP-CLI, ManageWP, or 20i's bulk tools) or it will not happen, and an unpatched client site that gets defaced becomes your professional problem.
- Set the terms in writing. What does the £20/month include? Response times, backup retention, how many content changes, what counts as new work. Without this you will do unlimited work for a fixed fee.
- Plan the exit. When a client leaves, can they take their site? The answer should be yes, cleanly and without drama — it protects your reputation, and holding a site hostage is both unpleasant and short-sighted.
The model that suits most freelancers
A reseller account with 20i or Krystal, a written care plan with defined scope, automated updates, and monitoring on every site so you find out before the client does. If you would rather not carry any of it, model three — client buys their own hosting, you get access — is a perfectly respectable business decision that plenty of good agencies make deliberately.
And if a client's site genuinely needs managed servers with an SLA, hand it to Catalyst2 or Clook and take a referral. Knowing the ceiling of what you want to support is part of the job.
Published 8 July 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.