You already run your clients' websites. Eventually you also have to run the machine behind them, and that is where the job changes. Moving from shared hosting to a server you administer makes you responsible for uptime, backups, access and certificates. This guide shows how an agency can package that service without improvising during the first incident: plan selection, handover, per-site billing, white-label, security boundaries and maintenance scope.
From shared hosting to agency-level responsibility
While a client site sits on shared hosting, the agency sells design, content and sometimes search visibility. The day it moves onto a server the agency administers, the relationship shifts: the client sees an address that has to answer, while you see a system to patch, certificates to renew and backups to verify.
A KVM VPS on NVMe gives an agency the control it needs: root access, one dedicated IPv4 address, a management panel (web console, reboot, reinstall, DNS), automatic backups, a firewall with DDoS protection, 24/7 supervision and support six days a week. Delivery happens in under fifteen minutes after the order, which matters when a client signs on Friday and expects the site live on Monday.
What the agency keeps, what it delegates
You keep the client relationship, the technical call and the budget. You delegate physical infrastructure, networking and DDoS protection to the hosting provider. Write that boundary down: the 99.9% availability commitment covers infrastructure, not the client's site code and not a plugin that nobody updated. An agency that promises 100% uptime on a client site is promising something it does not control.
Sizing the plan against your portfolio
The temptation is to buy the smallest plan and keep stacking sites on it. In practice, three signals decide the plan: how many sites are live, whether a transactional database sits behind them (shop, ERP) and whether you need a staging environment. These are the plans currently available.
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | NVMe | USD / month | MAD excl. tax / month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS-1G Démarrage | 1 | 1 GB | 30 GB | 9.99 | 94.48 |
| VPS-2G Business | 1 | 2 GB | 40 GB | 19.99 | 189.06 |
| VPS-3G Performance | 2 | 3 GB | 50 GB | 34.99 | 330.93 |
| VPS-4G Avancé | 2 | 4 GB | 80 GB | 39.99 | 378.22 |
| VPS-5G Ultra | 3 | 5 GB | 100 GB | 49.99 | 472.80 |
Three rules cover most situations. A brochure site or a blog fits on VPS-1G. A WooCommerce or PrestaShop store with a catalog and payments needs at least VPS-2G, and VPS-3G once traffic becomes steady. From four or five client sites on one machine, VPS-4G or VPS-5G stops the duct tape: you can isolate staging and keep headroom in RAM. Upgrading to a larger plan is possible at any time, without a painful migration.
Location: New York today, Rabat announced
Production runs in a New York datacenter. For a client in Morocco or Europe that remains workable for a brochure site; for a Canadian client it is an advantage, with under 5 ms to New York, about 14 ms to Toronto and 10 to 20 ms to Montreal. A Rabat datacenter has been announced but is not open yet: keep it out of any commercial proposal until it actually launches.
Access, handover and security boundaries
Handover is where agencies lose the most time and where disputes are born. The rule that holds up over years is simple: the agency keeps ownership of the hosting account, the client owns the domain name, the content and the application logins. Everything else gets written down.
- A signed handover document listing the credentials you pass on and the ones you retain.
- One named account per client for site administration, never a shared login.
- Backups enabled at provisioning, with the date of a restore test recorded.
- TLS certificates and their automatic renewal checked before go-live.
- A written exit procedure: what gets exported, within what delay, at what price.
Keeping client sites apart
Two client sites on one VPS share the kernel, the PHP interpreter and the database server. A compromised site can therefore expose the others. Three measures usually suffice: one system user per site, separate databases with distinct passwords, and a web application firewall in front of each site. On a sensitive project, such as e-commerce, health data or financial services, one dedicated VPS per client is the only honest answer.
Billing per site without burning hours
An agency hosting ten sites does not invoice ten copies of the same line item. It builds three readable packages and lets the client choose: an essential tier (hosting, backups, certificate, supervision), a comfort tier (the above plus updates and a monthly intervention allowance) and a peace-of-mind tier (the above plus staging and restore tests). What changes between tiers is not server size, it is the time you commit.
The white-label option
White-label hosting is available from Open Vista through a partnership framework built for agencies. The value is commercial as much as technical: your client sees your brand, your support and your terms, and you keep control of the relationship. The conditions are described on the agency partnership page, worth reading before you quote.
Some line items resell easily and add perceived value: a wildcard certificate at the launch offer of 1,290 MAD per year, the monitoring and renewal option at 490 MAD per year, or installation of a certificate outside hosting at 490 MAD. Those are numbers a client can understand, and they keep you from negotiating your margin on the VPS price alone.
Maintenance contracts: define the scope
A badly written maintenance contract costs more than it earns. Three things belong in it: what is included each month, what is billed separately, and how fast you respond. The monthly fee usually covers security updates, backup verification, supervision and certificate renewal. Out-of-scope work, such as a new site release, a migration or a recovery after a client-side mistake, is billed by time spent.
For that calculation, the published IT consulting packages give an order of magnitude: 669.99 USD for 10 hours, 2,382.99 USD for 40 hours and 5,212.99 USD for 100 hours. A client who sees that scale understands why out-of-scope work is invoiced.
The three clauses that prevent disputes
- Scope: the list of covered sites and domains, with the application code explicitly excluded.
- Response time: a commitment in business hours, not a promise of permanent availability.
- Backups: frequency, retention period and the number of restores included per year.
FAQ
One VPS per client, or one VPS for several sites?
It depends on the risk you accept. For low-traffic brochure sites, a VPS-4G or VPS-5G holding several isolated sites makes economic sense. For a store that takes payments, or a site handling sensitive data, one dedicated VPS per client avoids making one client carry another client's risk.
Who should hold the client's domain name?
The client. A domain is an asset, not a technical service. The agency can manage DNS records and renewals, but the registrant must be identifiable and the credentials stored somewhere other than one employee's mailbox.
What exactly does the 99.9% commitment cover?
It covers infrastructure availability: network, hypervisor, storage and access to the machine. It does not cover configuration errors, a failed application update or a badly optimized site hitting its limits. That distinction has to appear in your own client contract.
Can hosting be resold under a white label?
Yes, within the agency partnership framework. You invoice your client under your own name, and the technical relationship with the provider stays yours. Just make sure your contract states who answers during an incident, and how quickly.
Conclusion: build the offer before the first client
Hosting client sites is not a natural extension of web agency work: it is a second business, with its own commitments and costs. The agencies that cope are the ones that wrote their packages, clauses and handover procedure before signing, not the ones improvising an invoice after the first outage.
Two pages are enough to move forward: the agency partnership framework for white-label terms, and the NVMe VPS page for plans, specifications and delivery in under fifteen minutes. Pick a plan, write your handover procedure, then invoice the first site with a scope everyone understands.