If you want to build a recurring revenue stream for your agency, selling hosting to your clients is one of the best things that you can do. Instead of getting paid for a one-off project and waving goodbye, you can build a long-term relationship that puts money in your pocket every month.
As an agency, you want to set your clients up for success by offering the most reliable, performance-optimized, and secure hosting. However, if your clients have looked at some of the budget hosting options out there, your clients might not be convinced of the benefits of spending a little more for a premium managed hosting service.
In this post, we’re going to share strategies that you can use to more effectively communicate the benefits of premium hosting to your clients.
We’ll cover translating technical hosting features into real business value, framing costs in the most accurate way, and using real-world examples to make those arguments even more impactful.
Let’s get into it, starting at the very beginning…
Understand your clients’ pain points
If you want to effectively pitch premium hosting to your clients, you need to understand each client’s pain points. That is, what are your customer’s biggest doubts and worries when it comes to choosing premium hosting for their website?
If one client is worried about costs while another client is laser-focused on speed and performance, you’ll want to pitch those clients in different ways.
So — how can you figure out each client’s pain points?
The most straightforward way is to ask them directly.
Some clients might be able to list their pain points right away. For example, if a client has been experiencing issues with security or uptime with their current host, they might be looking for solutions to solve those problems as soon as possible.
In these situations, you can tailor your pitch to directly address the issues your client is experiencing right now.
However, if this is your client’s first foray into web hosting, you might need to ask a few more questions to help them shape their thoughts. You can also consider taking a more general approach when covering the benefits of premium hosting rather than emphasizing any specific areas.
Translate technical points into business value
Once you understand a customer’s pain points, you can move into crafting a pitch that addresses your client’s pain points while also covering the other benefits of premium hosting.
However, instead of focusing on technical details when pitching your clients, you should highlight how those technical details can eliminate a client’s pain points and help your client achieve long-term business success.
In this section, we’ll focus on how you can translate important areas of premium hosting — speed, security, uptime, etc. — into business value.
Speed = more revenue and happier users
One of the big benefits of premium hosting is improved performance and faster load times, thanks largely to more performance-optimized infrastructure.
For example, Kinsta can offer fast performance thanks to features like Google Cloud origin hosting, smart edge caching on Cloudflare, a global content delivery network (CDN), etc.
Listing off these features probably won’t be the most effective approach for most clients, though.
Instead, focus on the end result of all these features, which is faster load times and better performance under scale. Then, communicate how those improvements can help your client achieve more business success:
- Higher conversion rates. There’s lots of data showing that faster website load times can increase conversion rates, which means your client could sell more products or generate more leads.
- Improved search engine optimization (SEO). Having a quick-loading site means clients will get the most from their SEO efforts, which can help them connect with more customers via Google search.
- Happier users. People want websites to load fast quickly, so having a fast-loading website creates a better user experience for your client’s customers.
Beyond focusing on load times for a single visitor, you can also highlight the scalability of premium hosting.
You want your client to understand that their site will still offer speedy performance even if there’s a traffic bump. Help them understand the business impact if their business were to go viral or be featured in the news only for their site to slow down or crash.
Security = trust and reputation management
Security is another area where premium hosting can excel. For example, Kinsta’s managed hosting builds in isolated containers, firewalls, SSL certificates, DDoS attack protection, malware scans, and many other protections.
However, as with performance, focusing on these technical protections directly might not move the needle for your client. Instead, highlight the importance of security to the client’s reputation and customer trust.
Your client has probably invested a lot of time and energy into building their reputation and creating trust with their customers. However, one security incident could undo all of this work or at least set your client back significantly.
Beyond a loss of trust, security incidents can also have more tangible costs in the form of lost revenue or other monetary costs associated with data breaches.
Highlighting how premium hosting can offer extra protection against these incidents can be very effective.
Uptime = reliability
Accessing more reliable uptime is another big benefit of premium hosting over standard hosting.
With Kinsta’s managed hosting, your clients’ sites will benefit from reliable infrastructure, as well as ongoing uptime monitoring to quickly detect and fix problems. Kinsta’s uptime is also backed by a service-level agreement (SLA).
To communicate this to your clients, you can highlight that better uptime means their business will always stay online, and they’ll have a much lower chance of losing revenue or hurting their reputation due to an outage.
If you have a general understanding of your client’s revenue, you could communicate this in hard numbers. For example, you could highlight what just 30 minutes of downtime during peak hours could mean in terms of lost revenue.
Backups = risk management
With Kinsta’s hosting, Kinsta will automatically back up your clients’ sites daily and store those backups in a separate environment. You also have the option to increase the backup frequency if needed.
Rather than talking about how your client will get “daily backups,” you can frame this as smart risk management. You can tell clients their data will always be safe, regardless of what happens.
This isn’t just important for protecting against malicious actors. It’s also important for those “oopsie” moments that clients might have. That is a situation where the client (or one of the client’s employees) accidentally deletes or breaks something.
No matter what happens, clients can be confident that they can protect against unexpected risks and get their site working quickly.
Managed platform = less time wasted
Lastly, you can discuss the general benefits and approach of a premium managed hosting platform. That is, features such as automatic updates, 24/7 support, backups, etc.
Here, you should focus on how the end result of all those managed features is that your client won’t need to waste time managing their site. The premium hosting platform will handle most basic maintenance tasks, and clients can quickly connect with support if they ever have questions.
The overriding benefit here should be that your client can stop spending time on their website and instead put that time toward other important areas of their business, such as marketing, product development, and customer support.
Put the costs into perspective
Generally, premium managed hosting will cost more than budget hosting — at least in terms of the sticker price.
How you present that cost will play a big role in the success of your pitch, especially for more cost-conscious clients.
Here are some tips for most effectively discussing costs with your clients…
Frame it as an investment
Instead of talking about premium hosting as an “expense,” try to frame it as an “investment.”
Expenses cost money with no return, which means people want to avoid them.
Investments also cost money, but with the expectation that they will bring a return in the future. This is known as the return on investment or ROI for short.
How you accomplish this ties back with the other points discussed above.
For example, highlight the data showing that increasing a website’s speed can increase its conversion rate.
If your client could increase their site’s conversion rate, what would that mean in terms of real-world revenue? In many cases, the increase in revenue will be larger than the cost of premium hosting, which means that clients are getting a positive ROI.
Here’s a graphic from Cloudflare that showcases how load times can affect conversion rates:
If your client has a brick-and-mortar business, you could even make a real-world analogy. When your client chose the location for their business, they probably didn’t just choose whichever property had the lowest rent.
Instead, they most likely chose the location where they have the best chance of reaching paying customers, even if that meant higher rent.
Choosing hosting for a company’s online presence works similarly. It’s not about finding the absolute cheapest hosting provider. Rather, it’s about finding the best location to set up the client for business growth and long-term success.
Break down the total cost of ownership
Another great way to approach cost is to focus on the total cost of ownership when it comes to hosting rather than just the cost of the hosting plan itself.
That is, while premium hosting might have a higher sticker price, it includes many features that clients might need to pay for themselves if they use standard hosting.
For example, Kinsta’s hosting already includes value-added features such as premium DNS, SSL certificates, a CDN, daily backups, image optimization, uptime monitoring, a web application firewall (WAF), malware removal, etc.
With standard hosting, clients might need to pay for some or all of these features, which could bring the total cost more in line with premium hosting.
Highlight cost savings in other areas
Finally, you can highlight how premium hosting can help the client reduce or avoid other “costs,” such as security breaches, downtime, emergency fixes, and wasted time waiting for support responses.
For example, for certain clients, the loss in revenue of just 30 minutes of website downtime could easily exceed any cost savings from using standard hosting.
You can also frame these cost savings as another type of investment. In this scenario, the positive ROI is a reduction in other costs or potential losses rather than an increase in revenue.
Showcase real-world examples and success stories
Another way to make your pitches more impactful is to bring in real-world examples and success stories. Rather than just telling your clients about the business benefits of premium hosting, you can show them real-world case studies to drive home the point.
Here are two ways to do that…
Highlight success stories from other clients
One of the most persuasive ways to highlight the benefits of premium hosting is to share real-world success stories from clients who made the switch.
These success stories let you show clients that all of the other things you discussed aren’t just theoretical — they work in the real world.
You could use success stories from your clients if some existing clients permit you to share the data. Another option would be to share some companies from the Kinsta Client Success Stories page.
You can find client success stories across a range of niches and company sizes, which lets you tailor the pitch to each client.
For example, if you’re pitching hosting to a client with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, you could share how Kinsta’s premium hosting helped Mekari improve its conversion rates and search engine optimization.
Show a side-by-side comparison
Another way to bring in real-world data is to show your client a side-by-side comparison of their actual website on standard hosting and premium hosting.
You could host one version on the client’s current host and another version on premium hosting. Then, you can run performance tests to highlight the improved performance of premium hosting.
If you use Kinsta’s hosting, you can easily set this up using a staging site — make sure to enable edge caching for the staging site to get the best performance possible.
Summary
Ultimately, the main principle is that you should avoid being overly focused on technical details and instead communicate how premium hosting can address your client’s pain points and help your client achieve real business goals.
These goals could be boosting revenue, maintaining their reputation, protecting their company from risks, and optimizing how they use their time. Premium hosting should be presented as an investment in achieving those goals rather than an expense.
Finally, if you’re looking for premium hosting for your clients’ websites, check out Kinsta’s agency hosting plans to learn how they can help you achieve your business success.
To hear from lots of other agencies who are already hosting their clients with Kinsta, you can also read some of the Kinsta Client Success Stories.
Kinsta
Senior Editor at Kinsta, WordPress Web Developer, and Content Writer. Outside of all things WordPress, I enjoy the beach, golf, and movies. I also have tall people problems.
