Care Plan Economics
Turning a small-business WordPress build into a monthly account
The build invoice is paid once; the update liability lasts as long as the site does, and it lands on whoever hosts it unless somebody wrote down otherwise.
Straight answer first
Sell the small-business WordPress site as a managed account rather than as hosting: Pro WordPress at $5.59/mo is your cost of goods, and the retainer you charge on top is for updates, backups and being the person who answers when the site is down.
That framing decides everything else on this page — what the client believes they bought, who is liable when an update breaks the shop window, how much time forty of these accounts take out of a month, and what the contract has to say before the first invoice goes out.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 4 August 2026
NVMe
Under every client install
Free
Domain on the first year
99.9%
Target you can put in writing
Flat
Cost of goods at renewal
A trading business does not want WordPress. It wants the phone to ring, and the website is one of the things that makes that happen. That gap between what you are selling and what they are buying is where every uncomfortable conversation in this line of work begins, and it is closed with a written scope rather than with a better host.
Our WordPress shelves are Launch WordPress at $4.19/mo, Pro WordPress at $5.59/mo and Elite WordPress at $9.09/mo. Those are the numbers underneath your retainer. The commonly quoted retail figure for a managed small-business site is £15–30 a month bundled with updates and small fixes, which tells you the margin is in the management, not the megabytes.
What the client thinks they are buying
Ask a trading client what their hosting does and you will hear a version of 'it keeps the website up'. Ask what they expect you to do about a plugin conflict and the answer is 'fix it', with no sense that those are two different products with two different price tags. The client is not being unreasonable — nobody has ever explained the boundary to them.
So explain it in the proposal, in one paragraph, in their language: the account keeps the site online, takes a copy every day and holds a certificate; the retainer covers core and plugin updates, a check that the backups are real, and a small monthly allowance of changes. Anything past that allowance is quoted. Clients accept this readily when it arrives before the first invoice and resent it deeply when it arrives after the third.
Managed WordPress does part of the work for you. Core and plugin updates are handled without you, WordPress Toolkit Deluxe sits on the shelf at no extra charge, and up to ten staging copies are available per plan — which means your 'we test before we push' promise is something you can actually keep rather than something you say.
Where the update liability actually lands
Small-business WordPress sites are lost to neglect far more often than to clever attackers. An out-of-date plugin on hosting nobody manages is the overwhelmingly common route in, and the awkward part for an agency is that the client will attribute the break-in to whoever last touched the site — which is you, because you built it.
That is an argument for taking the liability deliberately rather than inheriting it by accident. If you are managing updates, say so and charge for it. If you are not, say that too, in writing, and put the client on a plan where the platform does the updating: managed WordPress applies core and plugin updates without anybody remembering to, and Imunify360 stands on guard on the Elite tiers with backups taken every four hours.
The one thing you should never do is leave it ambiguous. Ambiguity here is not a legal risk so much as a relationship risk — a client who believes you were watching, and finds out you were not, does not send a second invoice's worth of goodwill your way.
The monthly shape of forty of these
Forty managed WordPress accounts is roughly a day a month of genuine work if you have automated the routine parts, and a week a month if you have not. The difference is entirely down to whether you are logging into forty dashboards by hand. WP-CLI over SSH is available on the plans, and one script that reports plugin versions across your whole book turns a morning into a coffee.
The second lever is staging. Ten staging copies per plan means you can hold a tested copy of the awkward sites permanently, so the update that breaks a booking form breaks it somewhere nobody can see. Clone, update, look, push — the whole loop is a click each way from the panel.
The third is knowing which accounts to move up. A brochure site with a contact form is comfortable on Launch WordPress at $4.19/mo with its 100k monthly visit allowance. A site running memberships, a booking system and a chatty plugin stack belongs on Pro WordPress at $5.59/mo or Elite WordPress at $9.09/mo, where the visit allowances are 400k and 1M and there are more cores and RAM behind it.
The handover clause to write first
Every managed account eventually ends, and the professional part of this trade is entirely in how that goes. Decide now: on cancellation, the client receives a full cPanel backup and their domain, and you help point it at whoever comes next for a fixed fee or for nothing, depending on how you want to be spoken about afterwards.
Keeping each client in a separate cPanel account is what makes this possible. A backup taken from an isolated account restores onto any other cPanel host anywhere. A client site living as an addon domain inside your own account does not — extracting it is a manual job you will not have time for on the week it is asked for.
Put the domain in the client's name from the beginning, even when you registered it. Domains registered through an annual hosting order are free for the first year and renew at ordinary list price afterwards, and once the registry's usual 60-day lock has passed they can move anywhere. An agency that holds client domains hostage acquires exactly one reputation, and it is not one that survives a small industry.
Why the cost of goods staying flat matters to you
Your retainer is quoted annually and your client will hold you to it. A supplier whose renewal price matches its order price is not a marketing line in that context — it is the thing that stops you eating a margin cut in month thirteen on a price you already published.
Order an annual plan and the first year of the domain registration is on the house, which is a line you can pass on to the client or keep, as you prefer.
- Cost of goods you can forecast a year out
- Staging copies included, so testing is not billed by the site
- WP-CLI and SSH for managing a book of sites at once
- A clean backup that restores onto any cPanel host
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Updates handled by the platform
Core and plugin updates run without anybody remembering, which is the part of a care plan clients assume they are getting anyway.
Ten staging copies per plan
Test the awkward sites somewhere private, so an update that breaks a booking form breaks it where no customer is looking.
WP-CLI across your whole book
SSH and WP-CLI turn forty dashboard logins into one script, which is the single biggest lever on your monthly hours.
Flat cost of goods
The order price is the renewal price, so a retainer you quoted in January is still profitable the following January.
A clean exit for every account
Separate cPanel accounts produce backups that restore anywhere, which is what makes a client handover a formality rather than a project.
A company behind you on record
IGI Security Services Ltd, registered in England and Wales — a real trading entity when a client's accountant asks.
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
Write the scope before the price
One paragraph in the client's language covering what the account does, what the retainer covers, and what gets quoted separately — before the first invoice, not after the third.
- 2
Pick the shelf from the plugin stack
Brochure sites sit on Launch WordPress at $4.19/mo; membership, booking and shop plugins belong on Pro WordPress at $5.59/mo or Elite WordPress at $9.09/mo.
- 3
Automate the reporting on day one
A WP-CLI script that lists core and plugin versions across every account you hold is the difference between a day a month and a week a month.
- 4
Agree the handover in writing
Full cPanel backup plus the domain on cancellation, with the domain registered in the client's name from the start — decided now, not during the argument.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Each client in their own cPanel account, never an addon domain
- The domain registered in the client's name from day one
- A written scope covering updates, backups and change allowance
- Staging copies used before anything is pushed live
- WordPress Toolkit handling core and plugin updates
- Daily backups, with a restore you have actually tested
- Imunify360 or ImunifyAV+ watching every client site
- A monthly plugin-version report across the whole book
- SSH and WP-CLI enabled for bulk management
- A handover procedure written before the first cancellation
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
What should a WordPress care plan actually include?
Core and plugin updates, a monthly check that the backup restores, uptime monitoring, and a small allowance of content changes — typically an hour. Exclude design work, new features and anything involving a third party's API, and quote those separately. The commonly quoted retail range of £15–30 a month reflects that scope; charging within it for unlimited changes is how agencies end up subsidising their own clients.
Who is liable if an automatic update breaks a client site?
Whoever the client believes was watching, which is why the written scope matters more than the technical arrangement. Practically: use staging for the sites with fragile plugin stacks, keep daily backups, and make sure the client knows a restore is minutes rather than days. A break that is fixed inside an hour rarely becomes a liability conversation at all.
Do I put client WordPress sites on managed WordPress or on my reseller plan?
Reseller hosting gives you WHM, per-client isolation and private nameservers, which is what you want for a book of accounts you bill yourself. Managed WordPress plans are the better fit for a small number of demanding sites where the platform doing the updating is worth more than the account structure. Plenty of agencies run both and route by plugin stack rather than by client size.
How do I explain a price rise to a client on a care plan?
You mostly do not have to, because your cost of goods does not move — the order price is the renewal price on our shelves. When you do raise a retainer, raise it on scope rather than on cost: more sites, more allowance, a shorter response target. Clients accept paying more for more far more readily than paying more for the same.
Can the client keep their mailboxes if they move the website away?
Yes, and it is worth telling them so early, because the fear of losing email is what keeps clients on hosting they have outgrown. Mailboxes on the client's own domain are part of the plan; if the website moves and the mail stays, the MX records point here and the site's A record points elsewhere. Standalone Email Hosting at $2.99/mo covers the case where the website goes somewhere that does not do mail at all.
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