Reseller Brief
News site hosting — The local news client, and what breaks on the big day
The day a local story gets picked up regionally is the day your phone rings, and the hosting decision that decides how that call goes was made months earlier.
Straight answer first
Put a news client on cached WordPress with Elite-tier resources and hold the surge in the cache rather than in your support queue. The big-story day is the client's entire business model, so your job is to make it an ordinary Tuesday for the machine.
The rest of this page is about the parts that are yours rather than theirs: what a hundredfold spike does to the neighbours on your shelf, what the editors experience while the traffic is peaking, how much headroom you keep back and never sell, and where the escalation goes when it is genuinely beyond you.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 24 August 2026
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Uptime target we hold
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Renewal, no year-two rise
News is the client type most likely to expose a reseller. The traffic arrives in violent bursts, the work is public, and the moment it goes wrong is the moment the client cares most.
It is also good business. A newsroom pays for capacity it uses on twelve days a year and sits quietly the rest of the time, which is exactly the shape of account a well-run shelf absorbs. The trick is knowing which part of the surge the cache eats and which part lands on you.
What the spike does to the rest of your shelf
A regional pick-up can multiply a local title's numbers a hundredfold inside a couple of hours. Almost all of it is anonymous readers pulling the same handful of article pages.
Served from cache that is bandwidth and very little else, and the neighbouring accounts never feel it. Served uncached it is PHP execution and database reads, and then it is not just the newsroom having a bad afternoon.
So the first thing to verify on a news account is that page caching is on, that the cache is not being defeated by a cookie the client's analytics plugin sets on every visitor, and that the archive is not generating uncached search queries at the same rate.
What the newsroom sees while it is happening
Editors work on the wrong side of the cache. Everything they do is authenticated, which means PHP workers, database writes and no cached shortcut anywhere.
That is the experience the client will describe to you afterwards. Readers had a fine afternoon; the newsroom found the admin heavy while three journalists filed against each other. NVMe storage and object caching are what keep publishing fluid mid-surge, and they are worth more to a news client than another gigabyte of bandwidth.
If several people are editing simultaneously, check the worker allocation before the client does. Running out of workers looks exactly like a slow server to somebody trying to get a story out.
The headroom you hold back and never sell
Overselling works because most accounts never claim their allocation. A news title is the account most likely to claim it, all at once, without warning.
The discipline is to keep a reserve on any machine carrying a title like this and treat it as unsellable. It is not generosity; it is the difference between one client having a busy day and every client on the shelf having a bad one.
Write the same logic into your own quote. If the client wants the big day handled, they are buying headroom that sits idle most of the year, and that is a reasonable thing to charge for rather than absorb.
The plan, and where the escalation goes
The plan for this is Elite WordPress. It carries the certificate, the move-in and the mailboxes already, and the renewal price matches the order price, so the number you quoted the newsroom is the number you are still working from next year.
Behind it there is a second line. When a problem is past your first-line work you escalate to us and pass the answer on in your own words. On a spike day that backstop is most of what you are actually buying.
Order an annual plan and the first year of the domain registration is included, which is a tidy thing to have on a launch quote for a new title.
The backstop is the product
Resellers are not buying disk. They are buying somebody competent to escalate to at four in the afternoon on the day their client is on the regional news, and a supplier who will not appear in front of that client.
Real people answer the counter at any hour, including the awkward questions other hosts wave off as out of scope.
- Escalation to engineers, not a first-line script
- Server-level caching, not a plugin the client can switch off
- Your nameservers in front of every account
- One flat price through the busy month and the quiet one
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
A second line behind you
Escalate what is past your first-line work and pass the answer on in your own words. Nobody at the newsroom ever meets us.
Caching at the server
LiteSpeed runs at the machine rather than as a plugin, so the spike is served from cache even when a client has been experimenting in the admin.
Headroom you can plan around
NVMe storage and sensible account densities on every shelf, so the reserve you hold back is real capacity rather than a hope.
A supplier you can name
IGI Security Services Ltd, registered in England and Wales, with a public record a cautious editor can look up.
Margin that survives renewal
The order price is the renewal price, so a title you quoted this year does not need repricing next year.
The plan behind this page
Elite WordPress is what we would put a working newsroom on, with the essentials already included rather than added at checkout.
Price Tags Compared
How we compare with the household names
Typical sign-up and renewal prices across the market, set next to ours — the second number most comparison charts leave off.
| Line item | Hosting SellerBest seller | Typical big-brand host | Typical budget host | Typical loss-leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Price at renewal / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Renewal price on the entry plan is unchanged | ||||
| SSL on every plan | ||||
| Site migration included | ||||
| The entry plan uses NVMe storage | ||||
| Entry plan gets a backup daily | ||||
| Live human support, 24/7 |
*The number in our column is the cheapest plan on our shelf, priced on an annual term and pulled live from the very catalogue that feeds the pricing page, so it cannot drift out of date. Other columns show the ranges shared hosting tends to advertise inside each bracket: introductory rates that normally ask for a one-to-four-year commitment, then climb once that term expires. Naming individual competitors and printing their prices is something we have stopped doing. A figure we cannot re-check on the day you read it has no business sitting in front of you. So compare us with whoever you are genuinely weighing up, and read the renewal line first. That line tells you more than the headline ever will.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Audit the cache before you quote
Check what sets cookies on the client's current site. A single analytics or consent plugin serving a unique cookie to every visitor turns a cacheable surge into an uncacheable one.
- 2
Size the admin, not the front page
Count the people who file simultaneously and allocate workers for them. Readers hit cache; the newsroom does not, and the newsroom is who complains.
- 3
Agree what a big day includes
Put the reserve capacity in the quote as a line the client is paying for, so the busy afternoon is covered by the contract rather than by goodwill.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- LiteSpeed caching running at the server rather than bolted on by plugin
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- Staging copies so a theme change is tested before the newsroom meets it
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- Daily backups with restores you run yourself, at any hour
- Free SSL on every site you host, reissued before it lapses
- Webmail plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for the newsroom's own clients
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- Site migration handled by our staff at no charge
- The renewal price on the tag matches the order price
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
How much of a traffic spike actually reaches the server?
Very little, if the cache is doing its job. Anonymous readers pulling the same article are served stored copies, so the surge turns into bandwidth rather than computation. What stays uncached is search, comments and the admin, and those are small by comparison. Architecture absorbs the big day; nobody has to be at a keyboard for it.
Do I need to warn my other clients before a title launches?
No, but you should hold back headroom on the machine carrying it. Overselling relies on accounts not claiming their allocation at the same time, and a news title is the one account that will. Keep a reserve unsold and the spike stays the newsroom's event rather than everybody's.
Where does a problem go when it is past me?
To us, and the answer comes back to you rather than to your client. First-line work gets easier surprisingly quickly, and the backstop for the hard afternoons is the part of a reseller plan that is genuinely worth paying for.
Can editors test a redesign without risking the live title?
Yes. Plans with staging clone the live site, you or the client work on the copy, and it is pushed across when everyone is satisfied. On a news account that matters more than usual, because the theme change nobody tested tends to be discovered by readers first.
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