If you want to offer web hosting but don’t want to manage your own server infrastructure, white-label web hosting could be the solution.
In this post, you’ll learn what white-label hosting is and some of the benefits that it can offer, compared to maintaining your own web servers like those behind Kinsta’s managed hosting for WordPress.
We also cover how Kinsta can work as a white-label hosting provider for WordPress sites, primarily for web agencies and freelancers looking for a reliable solution to offer their own hosting services for client websites.
What is white-label hosting?
White-label hosting is the practice of purchasing web hosting services from an existing provider and reselling those services to your own customers.
Essentially, white-label hosting lets you offer your own web hosting service without building your own hosting infrastructure. Instead, you use the white-label hosting service and resell it to your own customers.
There are two common ways that you can resell these hosting services:
- Set up your own hosting brand: You can create your own brand that looks just like any other hosting service. Customers will view you as a standalone brand, but you’ll rely on a third party’s hosting infrastructure to power everything.
- Sell services directly to customers: For agencies and freelancers, you can resell hosting services directly to your clients. This lets you offer your own hosting service to clients without having to set up a standalone web hosting company.
Benefits of white-label hosting for WordPress agencies
If you’re working with WordPress clients, there are a lot of benefits to this white-label hosting approach. Let’s go through three of the biggest:
You don’t need your own infrastructure
One of the most significant advantages of white-label hosting is that you can offer your own hosting service without needing your own hosting infrastructure.
Purchasing, optimizing, and securing hosting infrastructure is complex and requires setting up many connected services. For example, Kinsta offers edge caching on its global content delivery network, firewalls, dozens of data centers, automatic backups, and much more.
Even if setting up this type of infrastructure is within your technical knowledge, it’s still going to take a ton of time to do a good job.
Using white-label hosting from a quality provider like Kinsta lets you benefit from all this optimized infrastructure without doing any of the work yourself.
You can outsource support and maintenance
In addition to outsourcing the infrastructure itself, you can also outsource any ongoing support and maintenance.
This means you have very little ongoing time commitment to offer with your hosting service. You just need to collect money from your customers, while your white-label partner handles most of the day-to-day details of offering a hosting service.
Of course, there are potential negatives to outsourcing these details. If your white-label provider doesn’t offer quality customer support and maintenance, your customers will hold you responsible for any problems. That’s why it’s important to choose a white-label provider that makes you look good, instead of putting you on the hook for problems.
Kinsta’s quick response times, single-tier support, and proactive monitoring ensure that your customers still have great experiences, even if you’re not the one doing the work.
You control your own margins
Finally, offering a white-labeled hosting service also gives you full control over your margins, which is great for growing your business’s profits and earning recurring revenue.
You can choose what price to charge for the hosting services that you resell. When you combine this with the fixed monthly plans that many white-label hosting services offer, you’ll have full control over how much your business profits from each hosting customer.
How white-label hosting works at Kinsta
Kinsta’s white-labeled hosting is better suited for agencies and freelancers who want to resell hosting services to their clients, rather than for businesses looking to build their own standalone white-labeled hosting brand.
Below, we go through three key areas of using Kinsta for white-label hosting…
Dedicated hosting plans for agencies
To meet the needs of agencies and freelancers hosting client websites, Kinsta offers dedicated agency hosting plans for WordPress sites. These plans help you find the right option for your business, regardless of how many client websites you need to host.
The MyKinsta dashboard also makes it easy for you and your team to manage client websites, even at scale.
You can organize customer websites with filterable labels, search sites by name, manage team member access, and leverage tools to manage websites more efficiently.
As an added perk, you’ll also get free hosting for your own agency website, and you can get listed in the Kinsta Agency Directory.
White-labeled WordPress dashboard experience
When you host websites with Kinsta, Kinsta adds features to the WordPress dashboard that let users control caching behavior without logging into their hosting dashboard.
By default, these areas use Kinsta branding, including a top-level menu item named “Kinsta Cache” and footer text stating “Thanks for creating with WordPress and hosting with Kinsta.”
Here’s an example of the default experience, without any white-labeling:
If you’d prefer not to display Kinsta branding on your clients’ sites, you can easily enable white-labeling to hide all of Kinsta’s branding and remove the “Need Help?” section.
Here’s an example of what the same WordPress dashboard area looks like after enabling white-labeling:
Hosting dashboard access controls
If you’re reselling white-labeled hosting services to your clients, most of them won’t ever need access to the actual hosting dashboard.
However, there may be situations where a client does require their own hosting dashboard access.
While Kinsta doesn’t currently support white-labeling the MyKinsta hosting dashboard, you do get granular access controls so you can control exactly what each client has access to.
To start, you can give clients access only to their own sites, without letting them see any of your other customers’ sites. If needed, you can also further restrict client access, for example, by giving them access only to the staging version of their site, not the live WordPress site.
Summary
White-label hosting lets you resell hosting to your own customers, without needing your own hosting infrastructure. You could do this by creating your own standalone hosting brand or by offering a hosting service to your existing customers, which is more common with web agencies and freelancers.
With Kinsta, you can offer your customers best-in-class hosting while leaving all of the infrastructure, support, and optimization to Kinsta.
In addition to offering dedicated hosting plans for agencies, Kinsta also lets you white-label the WordPress dashboard to create a more bespoke client experience.
While Kinsta doesn’t currently extend that white-labeling to the MyKinsta hosting dashboard itself, you do get granular access controls for situations where you need to give customers access to the MyKinsta dashboard.
If you’re ready to get started, browse Kinsta’s agency hosting plans today.
Steve Bonisteel is a Technical Editor at Kinsta who began his writing career as a print journalist, chasing ambulances and fire trucks. He has been covering Internet-related technology since the late 1990s.
