If you want to build long-term relationships with your agency’s clients, hosting their websites is a great service to offer.
When things are going well, hosting your clients’ sites lets you build a predictable source of recurring revenue, while also putting your agency first in line if clients ever need additional work. If you choose the right hosting provider, you can do this without adding extra work for your team.
But it’s a problem when things are not going well with hosting your clients’ sites. Issues such as downtime, slow performance, security breaches, and inadequate support can deliver poor results for your clients, negatively impact client relationships (or even cause them to churn), and force your team to spend time administering hosting servers instead of performing more product tasks.
Below, we explain why a lack of hosting stability can undermine the goal of building long-term client relationships. Then, we show how Kinsta’s WordPress hosting can alleviate these pain points for agencies, along with real-life case studies of agencies that built stronger client relationships and avoided wasted effort.
Why hosting instability is the hidden threat to agency-client relationships
If a client chooses to turn a one-time project into an ongoing hosting relationship, they’ve probably had a good experience with your agency so far. After all, if they weren’t satisfied with what you offer, they probably would have moved in a different direction after the initial work.
If you want to continue nurturing that positive, long-term relationship with your agency, it’s essential to offer fast and reliable hosting for your clients’ websites.
Unfortunately, hosting instability can easily turn a previously positive client relationship into a negative one. This can lead to issues with client satisfaction and increase the churn rate of your agency’s clients.
Hosting instability can manifest in different ways, all of which can be detrimental to client relationships:
- Downtime: Website downtime, especially at an important time, will lead to client dissatisfaction. Downtime can damage a client’s reputation and cause them to miss revenue or leads.
- Slow load times: Even if there’s no downtime, performance issues can still be frustrating for clients. Slow load times degrade customer experience and can lead to lower conversion rates (which also means lost revenue for your clients). On the backend, clients might also feel frustrated when managing content in their website dashboards, which can lead to more client dissatisfaction.
- Security issues: Security issues cause the same problems as downtime and also open up even more reputational risk for clients. This is especially true if the security breach leads to leaked customer data, and clients face the unenviable task of notifying their customers about the issue.
- Support problems: While clients might not interact directly with your hosting provider’s support, issues with that support can damage client relationships. If it takes too long for your team to get results from support, your clients can feel the impact.
These types of instability aren’t just problematic for the immediate issues that they cause for client relationships. Every second your agency wastes on dealing with website downtime, performance, and security is also time that you and your team can’t spend on more productive tasks.
How Kinsta’s hosting eliminates variables and safeguards agency-client relationships
The best way to offer reliable, high-performance hosting to your clients is to choose an agency web hosting partner that handles these critical aspects for you.
Kinsta’s optimized web hosting offers guaranteed uptime, fast performance, easy scalability, multiple security protections, and 24/7 single-tier support. This helps you safeguard your agency-client relationships while you and your team can spend your time on more productive, revenue-boosting work, all while still maximizing client retention.
In this section, we take you through how Kinsta can help your agency excel in these five key areas:
- Website uptime
- Performance and page load times
- Scalability
- Security
- Support
Reliable infrastructure and proactive uptime monitoring
To prevent downtime in the first place, every website on Kinsta’s premium cloud infrastructure is hosted in its own container, so you don’t need to worry about one site affecting another (a common problem with hosting multiple client sites on the same server).
Kinsta’s hosting infrastructure is integrated with Cloudflare for secure firewalling, DDoS protection, and wildcard SSL support. Plus, Kinsta proactively monitors uptime for every website hosted on the platform. If a site goes down for any reason, Kinsta can jump in to fix server issues right away or promptly notify you of the downtime if the cause is an application-level problem.
Built-in performance optimizations for sites of all sizes
Whether your clients’ sites receive 1,000, 1 million, or more visits each month, Kinsta’s performance-first approach helps them achieve excellent performance.
Kinsta’s Cloudflare integration includes an HTTP/3-enabled CDN and full-page edge caching across Cloudflare’s global network of 300+ data centers, so website visitors can be served content from the location nearest to them.
In situations where it’s not possible to cache full pages (like e-commerce checkout pages), your clients’ sites will still be powered by a premium cloud platform. You can also choose from 27 different data center locations for any individual client site.
Many other hosts force agencies to use a single data center for all client sites in their account, which might not be optimal if you have clients targeting audiences in different geographic areas.
Your clients’ sites will also benefit from other built-in performance optimizations, including automatic image optimization, code optimization, Early Hints, and more.
Finally, Kinsta hosts each site in its own container, meaning each of your clients’ sites has its own resources and you never need to worry about one site’s resource usage affecting the performance of others.
Easy scalability for viral moments or long-term needs
Kinsta’s infrastructure is also built for easy scalability, which is essential for agencies.
Whether your agency needs to host more client websites or some of your clients’ websites have grown in traffic, you can be confident that your agency’s hosting can scale as needed.
You also won’t need to worry about disappointing your client if their site goes viral. The last thing you want is for a client’s site to get overloaded by traffic, crash, and force the client to miss out on the benefit of going viral.
Kinsta can easily scale a site’s resources to ensure it still delivers fast load times even during viral moments.
Security at multiple levels
Security issues can damage your client relationships and consume a lot of your agency’s time, so avoiding them is paramount.
To offer proactive security for your clients’ websites, Kinsta offers security protections at multiple levels.
As we’ve mentioned, each client site is hosted in its own container, which means that it’s isolated from your other client websites and has its own dedicated resources. Then, Kinsta’s integration with Cloudflare protects your clients’ sites at the network edge with Cloudflare’s firewall. This means that most bots and malicious actors are blocked before they even reach a site’s origin server.
In the unlikely chance that anything does make it past the firewalling and Kinsta’s other protections, Kinsta also performs regular malware scans and will clean hacked WordPress sites for free.
Finally, Kinsta will also automatically back up your clients’ websites every day to keep their website data safe. You can also use optional add-ons to adjust the backup functionality, such as increasing the frequency and archiving backups using your agency’s own Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage account.
Accessible, one-tier support from experts
Kinsta offers 24/7 live chat support across all plans, so you can help your clients whenever they need it.
Unlike many other hosting providers, Kinsta offers single-tier support. This means you get expert help from your first interaction, and there’s no need to escalate problems to higher-tier support staff just to get things fixed.
Kinsta offers stable, high-performance hosting for your clients’ sites. But if issues do arise, you can be confident that you can reach out directly to experts and get problems solved.
Success stories from agencies using Kinsta hosting
What you read above isn’t just marketing copy. Kinsta’s hosting is helping real-life agencies eliminate instability and offer quality hosting to their clients, leading to improvements in client satisfaction and retention.
Let’s look at a few real-life cases of agencies eliminating barriers and achieving success with Kinsta.
wPowered
wPowered Inc. is a Taiwan-based web marketing agency that focuses on WordPress.
With only three team members and over 280 client websites, wPowered was struggling to find a provider that could provide quality hosting for wPowered’s clients while also not causing the agency’s three-person team to waste their valuable time on hosting problems.
After moving wPowered’s 280+ client websites to Kinsta, the wPowered team was able to deliver a much better service to their customers. Kinsta’s team was even able to help wPowered solve some checkout page performance issues for individual client sites, which further improved client satisfaction.
The move to Kinsta has been “instrumental in improving client satisfaction,” according to wPowered founder Chih Hua Lee, who also noted that Kinsta’s “improved performance, security, and ease of management have resulted in a significantly reduced churn rate,” which means that wPowered’s clients are more likely to stay with the agency long-term.
Organic Media Group
Organic Media Group is a Florida-based digital marketing agency founded by Steve Snyder that works with small and medium-sized businesses.
Before recommending clients to move to Kinsta, the Organic Media Group team regularly experienced problems with downtime and slow performance on client websites.
After recommending Kinsta to more than 200 clients, Steve “can’t even recall a scenario where we’ve had downtime.”
By avoiding downtime, Steve and his team are able to deliver great experiences to their clients and spend more time driving growth for their clients and less time dealing with hosting problems.
Paramark
Paramark is an Australia-based digital agency founded by Richard Perrin.
Prior to moving all client sites to Kinsta, Paramark had previously worked with four different cPanel-based hosting providers. To avoid website instability, Richard and his team had to engage in “excessive system administration” just to keep things running.
After moving Paramark’s client websites to Kinsta, the agency was able to deliver more reliable, performant client hosting, all without spending precious agency time on constant server maintenance and website monitoring.
In Richard’s words, what impressed him the most about moving to Kinsta is that “unplanned website downtime has been eliminated.”
These are just a few of the agencies that have achieved success with Kinsta’s hosting. To read even more stories, you can browse all of Kinsta’s agency case studies.
Summary
Once you’ve done the difficult work of attracting and onboarding a client, turning that engagement into a long-term relationship helps you maximize each client’s lifetime value and boost your agency’s revenue.
Hosting instability can be one of the biggest issues that gets in the way of maximizing client satisfaction and building a long-term relationship with your agency. No matter how happy a client was when the engagement started, persistent hosting issues with downtime, performance, security, and support can turn a positive relationship into a negative one.
Kinsta’s optimized hosting can help your agency avoid instability and achieve reliable uptime, fast and scalable performance, robust security protections and 24/7 single-tier support.
These factors won’t just help you build strong client relationships; they’ll also let your team focus on productive tasks rather than constantly putting out hosting-related fires.
If you want to try Kinsta for your agency, Kinsta will migrate all of your clients’ websites for free, regardless of their complexity. Head to Kinsta’s agency hosting page to learn more and get started.
Kinsta
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.
