Channel Decision
WordPress com vs self hosted — There is no reseller programme on the WordPress.com side
A client has arrived on WordPress.com asking you to look after it, and you are working out whether that is a job you can actually price.
Straight answer first
Self-hosted WordPress is the only one of the two you can put your name on, bill for and keep: it runs on an account you control, accepts the plugins your care plan depends on, and can be handed over cleanly when a client leaves.
WordPress.com is a perfectly reasonable product for an individual and a dead end for an agency. You cannot resell it, you cannot brand it, you cannot install what you need on the lower tiers, and every conversation about it ends with a client paying somebody who is not you.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 24 August 2026
99.9%
Uptime we commit to
24/7
Answered for you, not them
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SSL on every site you host
NVMe
Storage as standard
Most articles on this comparison are written for a person choosing where to put their first blog. This one is written for whoever has to maintain thirty WordPress sites for other people and make a living from it, which changes almost every answer.
The useful framing is control. Not control for its own sake, but control over the three things a care plan is made of: what gets installed, when it gets updated, and who can restore it. Lose any of the three and you are selling a promise you cannot keep.
One of these can carry your brand; the other cannot
Self-hosted WordPress sits inside a hosting account. On a reseller plan that account is one you created, under a package you named, reached through private nameservers carrying your domain. The client experiences your business, not a platform.
WordPress.com is a service the client buys from somebody else. There is no wholesale layer for you to sit in, no way to route support through your desk, and no version of the invoice with your name on it. Whatever you charge on top is a management fee for work on somebody else's platform.
That is not a criticism of the product. It is a statement about where you can stand in the transaction, which for a business is the whole question.
What a client can ask you for, and whether you can say yes
The requests that arrive in year two are predictable: a booking plugin, a custom post type, a CRM connector, a migration of five thousand products, a staging copy before a redesign, an export because they are moving to a new agency.
On self-hosted every one of those is a yes. Managed WordPress accounts here run WordPress Toolkit Deluxe with up to ten staging copies, WP-CLI and SSH for the work you do not want to do by hand, and AccelerateWP with Redis caching in front. Launch WordPress covers one site with 10 GB and 100k monthly visits, Pro WordPress takes 25 sites and 400k, Elite WordPress takes 100 sites and 1M.
On the other side, the answer depends on which tier the client happens to be on, and you will be the one explaining why their plan does not allow the thing they read about.
The licences that quietly decide your margin
Self-hosted freedom comes with a bill: premium themes, form builders, backup plugins, page builders and whatever else your standard build includes. Decide early whether those licences are yours across the estate or the client's individually.
Agency licences you renew centrally are almost always cheaper and always more reliable, because a client who forgets a renewal becomes an unpatched plugin becomes an incident on your watch. Put the arrangement in the contract and say plainly what happens to the licence if the client leaves.
Then treat updates as billable work rather than goodwill. Core and plugin updates can be handled automatically on managed accounts, but the testing, the staging check and the occasional rollback are yours, and they belong in the monthly fee rather than in your evening.
Packaging it so it sells as a product
Build two or three tiers and never more. Sites, storage, mailboxes, backup frequency, staging copies, update cadence and response time — set them in WHM or on the plan, name them yourself, and quote a single monthly figure.
Include the things clients assume are free and would resent paying for separately: SSL on every site you host, daily backups with restores you can run, a year-one domain on annual orders, Softaculous for the repeat builds, and malware watching on every account.
Then agree the exit at the start. A full account backup handed over, the domain unlocked, the licences dealt with as written down. Being easy to leave is the cheapest marketing an agency has, and it is the part WordPress.com clients never get to enjoy.
Wholesale WordPress, with your name on it
Managed WordPress accounts you can resell: Toolkit Deluxe, staging copies, WP-CLI and SSH, Redis-backed caching and automatic core and plugin updates — all sitting behind whatever you decide to call your care plan.
Free migration in means inheriting a client from another agency costs you nothing, and a renewal figure identical to the order figure means a two-year client quote is still true in month thirteen.
- Up to 10 staging copies per site
- WP-CLI and SSH on every account
- Automatic core and plugin updates
- Free migration for inherited sites
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
A platform you can brand
Accounts you create, packages you name, and private nameservers so the client's lookup ends at your business.
Staging before you push
Up to ten staging copies per site, so a plugin update is tested on a client's own content rather than hoped through.
Command line where it saves hours
WP-CLI and SSH on every account, which is how thirty sites get updated without thirty logins.
Caching already fitted
AccelerateWP with Redis and LiteSpeed in front, so speed complaints stop arriving before you have to bill for them.
Restores you control
Daily backups with one-click rollback, so a bad Tuesday is fifteen minutes rather than a support queue.
A clean exit for clients
Full account backups and an unlocked domain on request — being easy to leave is why clients recommend you.
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
Decide who owns the plugin licences
Central agency licences or client-owned, chosen deliberately and written into the contract along with what happens to them on the way out.
- 2
Standardise the build before you scale
One theme, one form plugin, one backup approach, one caching setup. Thirty bespoke stacks is thirty support surfaces and no economies at all.
- 3
Set an update cadence you can defend
Say when you update, where you test, and what you do when something breaks. Then price the cadence, because that is the actual product.
- 4
Move one inherited client before quoting the rest
Migration in is free, so take the awkward one first and time it. Whatever it costs you in hours is what a fair onboarding fee looks like.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Accounts you create under packages you named yourself
- Private nameservers so client sites resolve through your brand
- WordPress Toolkit Deluxe on managed WordPress accounts
- Up to ten staging copies per site for testing before you push
- WP-CLI and SSH access for estate-wide work
- AccelerateWP with Redis caching, and LiteSpeed in front
- Core and plugin updates handled automatically where you want them
- Daily backups with one-click rollback per site
- Free SSL on every site you host, reissued automatically
- Free migration in for clients arriving from another agency
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
Can I put my own brand on a WordPress.com site for a client?
Not in any way that makes you the supplier. There is no wholesale layer to sit inside, no way to route support through your desk and no invoice with your name on it. Anything you charge is a management fee for work on a platform the client owns directly, which is a fragile place for an agency to stand.
A client is already on WordPress.com — what does moving them involve?
An export of the content, a rebuild of anything the platform supplied rather than the site, a new set of plugins to replace built-in features, a redirect map and a delegation change. Quote it as a project, not a migration, and check first whether their theme is something you can reproduce.
Which tier should I put a straightforward brochure client on?
The smallest one that fits their site with headroom. Launch WordPress carries one site with 10 GB and 100k monthly visits; Pro WordPress takes 25 sites and 400k; Elite WordPress takes 100 sites and 1M. Buying above the need is margin you have already spent.
Who owns the site if the client stops paying the care plan?
Whatever your contract says, so make it say something. The defensible arrangement is that the client owns the site and the domain, you own any agency-wide licences, and a lapsed care plan means updates stop rather than the site vanishing. Write it down while everybody is still friendly.
Read next
Let's Encrypt vs Paid SSL
Free certificates against paid ones, judged by what you can actually charge a client for.
Addon Domains vs Separate Accounts
One account or many: how far apart client sites need to be kept, and what it costs either way.
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