It’s not your imagination!

We’re happy to let you know that we’ve rolled out Brotli to all of your WPMU DEV hosted sites, giving you on average 11.62% better compression than before (and faster sites as a result!)

It’s a change that’ll make a big difference particularly if your website includes lots of data, such as images, videos and other multimedia.

Keep reading to learn more about Brotli and how it will benefit your site.

What is Brotli?

Brotli, a compression algorithm developed by Google, offers significantly better compression rates than the traditional GZIP methodology we were previously running.

It compresses files more efficiently, producing smaller file sizes which reduces the bandwidth usage. This means your site will load faster and your visitors will have a smoother experience, especially if they’re on their mobile device or if they have a slower internet connection.

Brotli is supported by all modern browsers, so it’ll improve the experience for almost all of your users. If you’re not sure if your browser is supported or not, you can use this link to find out!

And don’t worry about the users who are on an older browser or a browser that doesn’t support Brotli yet. For them, your site will simply fall back to GZIP and it will still work.

What Do I Need to Do?

Good news – you don’t need to do anything.

Brotli has been enabled on your site by default, so you’re already enjoying that speed boost. Perhaps you noticed things were a bit faster? This is the reason why!

This *also* means that if you’ve been using a CDN provider (like, ahem, Cloudflare) to use Brotli, you no longer need it.

$avings!

How Much Faster is Brotli?

We rigorously tested Brotli to see if it really lives up to its promises.

We compared GZIP and Brotli compression on various WordPress files, such as the default “Hello World” post, as well as home pages from WPMU DEV templates including Landscaping, Modern Business, Persona and Simple Business.

As you can see from the results, Brotli beat out GZIP for bytes saved every time, making each file more effectively compressed.

The lower the numbers when it comes to data size in bytes, the better! As you can see in the table below, Brotli saved bytes in all categories, up to 17.02% for the modern business site.

If you’re interested to learn more about Brotli and how it works, you can check out the technical details here.

With this Annual Hosting Plan, you’ll get a free .com domain, and a free webmail account.

Plus, you’ll get the best hosting support you’ve ever experienced, and that’s a promise. Night or day, 24/7, the live chat will always be there for you. Because you deserve it.

This is not just a fling. We have something really special and I know we can build amazing things together, so let’s make a beautiful future.

Key Details aka. A Peek Inside the Ring Box

When you say yes to Annual Hosting, you’ll get:

• A free .com domain worth $12.40.
• A free webmail account:
  • $12 per year for Premium members ($1 per month)
  • $24 per year for Non-Premium members ($2 per month)

You’ll get everything you’ve already come to expect from WPMU DEV’s premium managed hosting, including industry leading service, unlimited visitor numbers, 99.9% uptime guaranteed and detailed site analytics.

Plus, you now have more server locations than ever to choose from, so you can offer visitors the best possible site speed.

If you’re ready, just choose the yearly option for your plan and we’ll take care of the rest.

Cheers to us!

*air horn noise*

*ahem*

Ladies and gentledevs, please put your hands up in the air and wave ’em like you don’t care. We’ve dropped 12 hot new hosting locations and this party just got more worldwide than ever before.

We already have hosting servers in 18 regions, including Seattle, Tokyo, Sydney, Amsterdam and Bangalore. By adding these 12 we now offer 30 different options, making it easier than ever to find a hosting server location close to your website visitors.

Read on to learn about our new regions, and why location matters to your site performance. 

First, Let’s Shout Out Our 12 New Regions

Here are the new locations we’re adding, spanning North and South America, Africa and the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Oceania:

• Mumbai
• Delhi NCR
• Osaka
• Johannesburg
• Madrid
• Manchester
• Melbourne
• Mexico City
• Santiago
• Stockholm
• Tel Aviv
• Warsaw

What’s Up With Server Location Anyway? Why Does It Matter?

When it comes to improving the performance of your website, choosing a server close to your customers definitely matters.

Here are some of the advantages of a strategically-located server:

Your Site Will Have Better Load Times

Want to decrease your risk of visitors getting frustrated and clicking the X because your site took forever to load?

When a user clicks on your website, the data gets transferred from the data center to their computer, via networks. The further the distance the data needs to travel, the longer it’ll take for the page to load. This data travel time is called latency.

The closer your viewers are to the web server, the quicker they’ll be able to access your site.

As well as lower latency, you’ll also have a shorter TTFB (time to the first byte), which is the time it takes for the web browser to receive the first byte of data after sending a request to the server.

This matters because, as Google likes to remind us, 53% of visitors will abandon your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. We all know the pain of a high bounce rate, right?

You’ll Improve Your Viewer Experience

Have a website with multimedia or interactive elements? Server location could be the difference between your customers grumbling at your loading screen or falling in love with your clever design.

Not only will your site load faster for visitors near your server location, but they’ll also experience a buttery-smooth, uninterrupted online experience.

Large files such as videos will load faster and play without buffering, and other content such as images will instantly appear.

It’s Better for SEO

Since hosting server location impacts page loading times, it’ll also give your SEO a boost.

Search engines love speedy sites, of course. But also, faster page speed and better user experience mean lower bounce rate and increased dwell time. The more time people spend on your site, the more you’re favored by the SEO gods.

Faster pages will also get crawled, indexed, and ranked quicker. Plus, search engines often have a local bias. If your users are searching for content in Melbourne, they’ll be more likely to get results hosted at a Melbourne data center than one in Sydney.

Every site shares the same IP address, every site is vulnerable to one of the other sites hogging all the resources, every site can be damaged by one hack, every site is in the same location.

We know this because we’ve surveyed our members at length and – even though nobody likes it – it’s hard to argue with that cost per site, especially when compared to standard managed WordPress hosting costs.

Well, that changes today. With Quantum.

Quantum: A Leap Ahead on Shared Hosting!

Every WPMU DEV Quantum plan comes with:

• Dedicated and compartmentalized resources
• Individual IP addresses
• Choice of 5 worldwide locations: US East, US West, Netherlands, Germany, Singapore
• 10GB storage & 500GB/m bandwidth
• Domain specific email, unlimited forwarders & uncapped visits
• WPMU DEV Pro plugins
• Optimized, cached, protected managed WP

For $4/m (or from $3.60/m if you pre-pay).

Yes, you read that right. That’s $4/m.

Not “in your first year”, “discounted” or “with a 24 month plan paid upfront”.

Just $4/m as a flat rate.

Oh, and if migrating 20 (or 100+ sites) sounds like a pain, then don’t stress it because we will migrate your sites for you, for free.

Exclusive to Premium

There are a few conditions that make Quantum able to be a thing.

First up, and perhaps most importantly, unlike the rest of our hosting offers, Quantum is exclusive to our Premium plan.

This excludes, for the first time, all our legacy memberships with the exception of lifetime members (which can only be earned, not bought).

This is both to thank our Premium level members and so that we can provide the same level of 24/7 expert support to this plan that we are committed to providing to every WPMU DEV member.

Find out more about our membership levels here and if you have any questions (or would like to talk about transitioning from a Legacy to a Premium plan) please contact our sales team, they’ll be happy to help.

To make Quantum lean and fast, we’ve also introduced some parameters:

• Staging, Multisite and a range of hosting tools are not available with this plan as they’re just too resource heavy.
• Due to resources limitations, we cannot allow downgrades to Quantum.
• Find out more on the Quantum page and in our documentation.

We’ve put these in place to ensure that your experience using Quantum, and that of your clients, is out of this world good.

And, of course, if you do need more resources, tools or to remove all limits, you can do that by simply upgrading a Quantum plan to one of our Bronze hosting plans ($12/m or $10.80/m with pre-pay).

Give Quantum a Go

If you are already a Premium level WPMU DEV member you can spin up a site now and give it a go in your Hosting area.

Also, all Premium memberships come with $144 hosting credit per year, so your first 3 Quantum sites will actually be for free!

As with all of our products, it comes with a money-back guarantee, so if you don’t like it / it doesn’t meet your needs, then you can just cancel your plan and ask us for a refund.

We reckon you will like it though :)

As above, if you don’t like it, just let us know and we will refund you any costs incurred.

But we really do think that you’ll actually want to stay!

We’re so excited to bring you a product that we think has the capacity to radically change how WordPress has been hosted for the better (and hey, even make the internet a better place as a result).

Any questions or comments please contact our sales team, we’re standing by and waiting to hear from you.

Client Billing is an integrated solution that is easy to set up, easy to use…and completely free!

In this article, we’ll explore the full gamut of top-notch features and show you how to set up and automate your client billing by integrating your services, pricing, and clients, with your payment processor account.

“Just now I input all of my websites and hooked it up to client billing, to see my MRR right there motivates me so much I think I will upgrade and push hard with business.” – Web Host Wizards (WPMU DEV Member)

Here are the topics we’ll cover:

• Feature-packed: Clients & Billing is Loaded
• Configuring The Components of Clients & Billing
  • Connecting Your Stripe Account
  • Initial Setup of Clients & Products
  • Understanding Client Roles & Access Permissions
  • Customizing Your Emails
  • Branding and Your Business Profile
  • Creating and Customizing Invoices
• Upkeep and Management of Clients & Billing in The Hub
  • Overview Summary
  • Managing Clients
  • Managing Products & Services
  • Managing Invoices
• Client Billing by WPMU DEV is the Keeper of All Things Accounting

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s dive right in.

Feature-packed: Clients & Billing is Loaded

We weren’t kidding when we set out to make an elevated experience out of the customer billing and payment process.

Look at all the features included in Client Billing:

• Bill Clients Fast – Create profitable subscription plans, and track your recurring revenue.
• Invoice with a Click – Professionally branded invoices, automated and ready to send in minutes.
• Clever Client Management – Includes everything you need to monitor clients, invoices, and subscriptions.
• Profitable Plans & Subscriptions – Create tiered plans unique to your business, and maximize revenue.
• Personalized Client Portal – Branded, user-friendly access for clients to remit payments securely.
• Streamlined Payments – One-time or recurring payments, the latter of which auto-charge clients after the first invoice is authorized.
• Per-Client Site Billing – Link subscriptions and invoices to site-specific products or services.

The above features are all part of The Hub, our all-in-one WordPress site management tool.

If you’re a member, you’ve already got access to this power performer. And if you’re not, sign up – it’s free – and The Hub & Client Billing are included.

Configuring The Components in Clients & Billing

Because there’s so much you can do in the Client Billing module, I wanted to lay out how we’ll go through the touchpoints.

1. Connect your Stripe account.
2. Initial setup of clients and products.
3. Branding and your business profile.
4. Create and customize invoices.
   

There’s a lot of great material to unpack, so let’s have at it. :)

Connecting To Your Stripe Account

Client payments in The Hub are currently made through the Stripe payment platform. Additional payment options (such as PayPal) are on the table for future inclusion, so stay tuned.

To start accepting payments in Clients & Billing, you’ll need to connect your Stripe account, so that’s our first order of business. And don’t worry; if you don’t yet have a Stripe account, you can easily create one through the Hub’s integration wizard.

Login to your WPMU DEV account, then navigate to The Hub > Clients & Billing.

From the Getting Started wizard, click the Connect with Stripe button.

Enter the Email and Password fields, using those you want associated with your Stripe account, then click the Log in button.

If you happen to have more than one Stripe account associated with the email address you’ve entered, they’ll be presented here.

Select the account you want from the listed options, then click the Connect button.

Continue with any additional steps in the setup wizard. (If you need to start over at any point, just click Return to WPMU DEV on the left side of the screen.)

Upon completing the wizard, you’ll be directed back to the Getting Started screen in your Hub and prompted to select the currency you want to use in your Client Billing portal.

Click on the box denoting awareness of currency not being changeable later, then you’ll be able to hit Finish Setup.

If you don’t already have an account with Stripe, the Getting Started wizard will prompt you to create one. It’s a quick and simple process, which puts you right back in The Hub upon completion.

If you prefer you can go directly to Stripe’s site, set up your account there, then return to the wizard in the Hub and complete the connection there.

Note that you can only connect one platform to any Stripe account at any one time. (This is due to Stripe’s policies.)

Initial Setup of Clients & Products

All of the tools you need to manage the Stripe account connected to your Clients & Billing, such as your business profile, your custom branding, the importing of products and clients, and more, are housed here.

Let’s look at them now.

Managing Your Billing Account

From the Hub’s Clients & Billing page, under Configuration > Billing Account, you’ll see the info associated with your Stripe account (name, email, and connection date).

The Payment Preferences section beneath shows the currency you selected, as well as the business name that will appear on your clients’ bank or credit card statements.

If you want to change the statement descriptor, just click on the name or arrow to the right of this row and edit as desired.

Finally, you’ll see Additional Tools at the bottom, which is where you can import customers or products & services from your connected Stripe account, if there are any associated with it.

To import clients or products & services, click on Import or the arrow to the right of the row.

From the resultant popup, select any clients you’d like to import, by checking the box preceding their email address. (Or click the checkbox to the left of the email address header to select them all.) Then click the Import button at the bottom, which will reflect the total number of clients you’ve selected.

The clients you imported will be listed under the Clients tab, where you can manage all activity relevant to your Hub business. You can also Add New Clients from the Clients tab. (See Adding Clients Manually for details.)

Lather, rinse, repeat for Importing products.

Pricing plans associated with an imported product will be imported automatically.

You can also create new pricing plans from the Products & Services tab. (See Adding Products Manually for details.)

Understanding Client Roles & Access Permissions

There’s another element we should take a look as it pertains to our clients: assigning roles.

It’s important to define and understand what the purpose of a client’s site access will be.

For some clients, you’ll want to allow access to billing only. For others, you may want to give access to a couple of different sections, but not full run of the house.

And others still, you may want to allow them to view and edit everything.

Assigning roles gives you complete control over what views and actions clients will have in your branded Hub. This has the following benefits:

• Omits unnecessary distractions and clutter; clients see only what you need them to see.
• Protects against unintentional actions with potentially dire consequences. (They can’t break what they can’t touch.) This gives you and your client great peace-of-mind.
• Allows clients to feel connected to their account information and see the value of what they’re getting through you.

For illustrative purposes, we’ll target three arbitrary types:

1. Regular Client = needs access to billing only (to view & pay online)
2. Hosting Client = needs access to billing and hosting
3. SEO Customer = needs access to billing and SEO for their website

Example #1 – Regular Client

Regular clients are the ones you’ll be doing all of the WordPress development for. You’ll provide reports, do site edits, and run the entire show. The only thing these clients will need is access to billing information.

Therefore, you just want them to be able to pay their invoices.

Clients & Billing in the Hub comes with three pre-established system roles, which are:

View All & Access Billing: client can access and manage their billing and view site data.

Edit All & Access Billing: client can view, edit, and take action regarding anything on their site and manage their own billing.

Access Billing Only: client can view and manage their own billing.

These preset roles can’t be edited or altered; that’s where custom roles come into play (which we’ll get into later).

Navigate to The Hub > Clients & Billing > Clients > Roles and select Access Billing Only.

Based on the premise that our Regular Client type will need to Access Billing Only, we’re going to select that as our default by clicking the Make default text in its row.

Now when you add new clients, it’s already established that this is their role. Of course, this is editable should we need to change it at any time.

Example #2 – Hosting Client

This client plans on focusing some of their business on hosting in addition to billing. For this case, the client would need access to the following 4 areas:

• Sites — to view the list of sites
• Hosting — to view the hosting options
• Site Billing – to view billing at site level
• Access Billing – to view the Billing tab and pay invoices from either the site billing or the global billing tab

Start by clicking on + Create New Role.

Give it a Name (in this example, we’ll call it ‘Hosting’) and select what access the client will have. We’ll enable the 4 areas as listed above.

Customize even further when clicking on each category dropdown. You can select View & Edit, View Only, or Custom.

If you select Custom, here’s a look at all the options you could select for the client to have access to in custom role creation, pertaining to Hosting.

Customize further by clicking the dropdown in each specific category (Staging, Analytics, Logs, Emails, etc), and selecting any/all of the options.

Here’s what Staging looks like:

Once you have everything customized, click Save – and that’s it! You now have a new, customized role you can assign to any client.

Example #3 – SEO Customer

This client wants to view SEO details, in addition to billing. We can take the same approach we just took with our hosting clients: create a new role, name it, and select SEO as an option available to the client.

Specifically for this case, access to the following 4 areas would need to be enabled:

• Sites — to view the list of sites
• SEO — to view the SEO options
• Site Billing – to view billing at site level
• Access Billing – to view the Billing tab and pay invoices from either the site billing or the global billing tab

If you choose to customize your SEO options for your client, they’ll be able to view SEO information, run new SEO Crawl, Apply config – basically anything you select here in permissions.

Hit Save, and the new role is now available.

Of course, this was just a demo of three random client types. You can set up ANY client type and customize it to fit your business needs.

For more information on setting up Users & Roles in The Hub, see How to Simply Set Up Users & Roles in The Hub for You and Your Clients.

Customizing Your Emails

Prior to inviting our clients to the portal, let’s customize the emails we’ll be sending.

If you’d like, you can configure an SMTP plugin that allows you to enable your own domain address as the sender email. That would result in a from address like this: admin@yoursitename.com

While your own domain as the from address is the most professional, it isn’t required. Without any changes, your from addresses will be something like these:

• Sent from a site without our hosting: wordpress@yoursitename.com
• Send from a site with our hosting: noreply@yourwpsite.email

You can use any SMTP plugin of your choice; we recommend our (free!) Branda plugin, which handles this task with ease, and comes fully loaded with additional white-labeling features. Check out this how-to guide on activating SMTP mode in Branda, and this helpful walk-through on SMTP setup through Gmail.

There are a number of different emails that are sent from The Hub Client to you and to your clients, depending on various triggers.

Emails that come to you will be branded with WPMU DEV, while emails that go to your clients will be branded with the logo & colors set up in your Business Profile.

Two additional informational pieces can be included or excluded from your email notifications:

• Business Branding – toggle for your logo & brand color (from Business Profile).
• Emails Footer Note – add a custom message at the bottom of all emails.

Here is an example of an email your clients could get:

Of course, any of the placeholder text in double brackets would be auto populated by the associated data in your hub before it is sent to you or your client.

Alright, roles have been considered and created accordingly, emails have been formatted… let’s put the finishing touches on our business profile.

Branding and Your Business Profile

Break out the logos and color codes! We’re going to make these billing materials our own.

From the Configure screen, click on the Business Profile tab.

In the Branding section, you’ll decide on the branding that will appear in your business invoices, emails, and billing receipts. It takes only a few seconds and minimal clicks.

Click on the right side of the Brand Logo row to upload your visual identity; likewise on Brand Color, to select your shade match via color selector box or hex code.

The logo you select will also appear in the top right corner of your clients’ profile menu when they log into your Hub via WPMU DEV.

Now we’ll add our business coordinates in the Business Info section – which will appear in any client documents you produce.

Simply click on Add or the arrow to the right of any row, and you’ll be able to enter every available field. (This info will have been imported if it was set up in your Stripe account but is always fully editable.)

If you created custom fields for your Business Profile, they will appear beneath the main Business Info, under Additional Info.

To add or edit custom fields, click on the Custom Fields tab, and enter as many additional items as you’d like in Business, and/or Client Profiles.

Creating and Customizing Invoices

Now that we’ve got our documentation branding in place, let’s create an invoice that uses it.

This is what you’ll send to your actual clients, and there’s a lot you can personalize.

Under Configurations, click on Customize Invoices. Click on any of the arrows or toggle buttons from the right-side menu column.

You’ll be able to select your numbering format, add a footer note, choose default language, add a logo, brand color, business name, and client information, as well as any custom fields you have added.

When you’ve got the content the way you want it, click on the Preview Sample button for a quick look-see, and it will open in PDF format.

With an Invoice template created, let’s make one for a specific client.

Click on the + Bill Client button at the top of the page.

From the modal popup, take the following actions:

1. Select the Client from the dropdown.
2. Select the Website from the dropdown (optional).
3. Select a Product/Plan from the dropdown and change the quantity if desired.

   

4. Add another Product/Plan if desired; repeat this step as needed.
5. Add a Tax if desired and repeat this step as needed.
6. Click the blue Continue button.

This will open the invoice that you’ve created thus far. You can check and see if the content is as you’d like it to be and add a note if desired.

At this point, you can Preview the invoice, Save as Draft, or Send Invoice.

Click Send Invoice, and we’ll send a white-labeled email to the client you selected. From the Invoices tab, you’ll be able to see it listed now, with status Payment Due.

Here is the email your client will see:

The client can simply click on the Pay Invoice link in the email, and it will take them to your branded hub, where they can quickly & easily remit payment to you.

That’s a wrap on the initial set up and configurations in Clients & Billing. Now we’ll move on to…

Upkeep and Management of Clients and Billing in The Hub

We’ve completed all of the preliminary steps in Clients & Billing! Now you can quickly and easily bill clients, collect payments, and manage your customers, all from one convenient area.

Of course, you’ll want to continually manage this content – from client contact info changes, to invoicing and payment status changes, and your own business details as well.

We’ll look at what’s involved in the continued management of these features, so we can keep all of our information current.

Overview Summary

The Overview section in Clients & Billing allows you to see a collective summary of key data and settings in your portal.

One of the coolest things about Client Billing in the Hub, in my opinion, is the ability to get to everything you want almost instantly.

The Overview section gives you an at-a-glance, sectioned view of the most important details, as well as a path to access these elements on the spot. Revenue, products & services, clients, account configs, billing activities – it’s all here.

This is a clever convenience that makes it a stand-out.

Let’s take a closer look at the displayed sections in the Overview.

Revenue

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) – the combined total monthly revenue from all active subscriptions, regardless of billing periods
• Active Subscriptions – the total number of active subscriptions from all clients
• Net Billing – the combined total amount billed for all subscriptions and other products (excluding refunds)

Clients

This module displays three items:

• Total Clients – the total of all active, inactive, & pending clients
• Average Billing per Client – Net Billing divided by total number of clients
• Clients with Active Subscriptions– the total number of clients with active subs

All of the summary totals above do not include any taxes.

To see the full list of Clients in your billing portal, click View All.

Products & Services

This module displays three items:

• Total Products/Services – the total number of products & services combined, including those with no pricing plans attached
• One Time Plans – the total number of active one-time pricing plans
• Recurring Plans – the total number of active recurring pricing plans

To see the Products & Services section in your billing portal, click View All.

Configurations

This module displays the name of the Stripe account you’ve connected to your Clients & Billing portal, and its status. A green check mark verifies that the account is active.

Click any of the configuration line items to see/edit the associated information.

Managing Clients

As discussed prior, clients must confirm your invitation to be able to access their billing portal in your Hub.

There are three different ways you can send clients an invitation: 1) when you’re initially adding them; 2) from the dropdown menu in the main client screen; or 3) in their individual client overview screen. In all cases, just click Invite/Invite Client.

This will generate a white-labeled invitation email to that client, which will look like this:

The Clients tab will populate with summary info about each client, once you have added one or more to The Hub.

Here is the information you will see in the Client overview section in The Hub:

• Client Info – the client’s name, email, and Gravatar (if available)
• Account Status – status of client email invite acceptance (Active/Pending), or if invite email has not been sent (Inactive)
• Sites – the total number of sites managed by this client
• MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) – this client’s average monthly revenue for all subscriptions (excluding taxes)
• Net Billing – the total amount this client has been billed to date, including taxes

You can access client management options by clicking on the ellipsis icon to the right of any client row.

If you select Manage Client from this dropdown menu, you’ll go to the Overview screen for that client. From here you can view and manage all aspects of the client’s account and subscriptions.

Managing Products & Services

Now we’ll look more closely at the Products & Services section.

This is where you’ll manage all the products & services that you offer to your clients within the Hub.

If you hadn’t yet imported products in the Configure module, you’d be prompted to add your first one – either manually, or as an import from Stripe.

We already did that, but I’ll show you how to manually add a product here.

Click the + New Product/Service button and enter the form fields info in the popup.

Under Pricing Plans, you’ll want to create at least one plan to associate with the product.

There are two billing types: Recurring and One Time.

Bill Every and No. of Billing Cycles only appear if you’ve selected Recurring as the type.

• Bill Every is the period of time that repeated billing will occur; options are: Day, Week, Month, and Year.
• No of Billing Cycles is how many times a client would be billed for a recurring plan before their subscription expires. (Leave this field blank if you want the plan to auto-renew until it’s canceled).

One time billing services are used for creating a single instance of a service rendered, such as a setup fee, or a site creation.

After you’ve added your first plan, click + Add Another Plan for each additional one you’d like to create. You can make as many as you want.

Once at least one product has been created, you’ll see it on the Products & Services screen, along with its status and the number of pricing plans associated with it.

In the below example, we created a single product – Support Only – with 2 recurring pricing plans – Yearly and Monthly.

To manage options for any product, click the ellipsis icon and select any option from the dropdown menu: View/Edit, Add a Pricing Plan, Duplicate plan, or Archive Product.

As before, you can manage options for any pricing plan by clicking the ellipsis icon and selecting the desired action from the dropdown menu.

The Archive option will deactivate a product or plan, making it unavailable for selection when billing a client. It won’t affect any existing client subscriptions.

When editing a product or plan, only the name & image of a product/plan can be changed. (This is a limitation of the Stripe API, so we are unable to modify it.)

There is an easy workaround though. If you want to make a change to non-editable settings in an existing plan, just make a duplicate, then edit the desired fields of the duplicate before saving it. Afterward, you can archive the original.

A note about deletions: You cannot delete a pricing plan from the Hub. That action must be done directly through your Stripe account, with the caveat that the plan hasn’t been used in a transaction. If it has, then archiving is your sole option.

Subscriptions

Because of the fluid manner of subscriptions, keeping track of them is a necessity. Luckily, managing subscriptions is a piece of cake in Clients & Billing.

Subscriptions are viewable by client. To see them, click on any client, then from the top menu sections – Overview, Products & Services, Invoices – click on Products & Services.

This page will display three Subscription Types, broken out into tabbed subsections, as follows:

• Current Subscriptions
• One Time
• Inactive Subscriptions

Current Subscriptions

This is where you’ll see any current subscriptions for this client. The status column will show as Active or Pending.

One Time

Sometimes the need to bill a client for a one time service will come up again. Say, for example, you do another site set up, and need to invoice them for it again.

When this happens, you don’t need to recreate the entire product or service. Just click Bill Again from the ellipsis dropdown menu on the desired line item. This will automatically bill the client again for the same one-time product.

Inactive Subscriptions are any subscriptions that were at one time active but are no more. The status column will show as Canceled or Expired.

You can easily reactivate any subscription for a client.

Click the ellipsis at the end of the desired row and select Reactivate Subscription from the dropdown menu.

When you reactivate a subscription, it will send a new invoice to the client and create a new subscription, which becomes active upon the client paying that invoice.

Managing Invoices

The more your business grows, the more invoices you will be sending out, and the more they will accumulate for record keeping.

While this could create a cluttered mess of paperwork and file folders, it’s carefully and neatly organized in The Hub’s Client Billing.

Everything is found in the Invoices tab of each client, and the content included is straight forward.

For a quick assessment, a red notifier icon on the Invoices tab header indicates the number of currently unpaid invoices for that client.

On the main Invoices page, you’ll see a summary list of all of the invoices for this client.

Click anywhere on a row to view the actual invoice or click on the ellipsis icon at rows’ end to show the dropdown menu for other actions. Depending on the status of a given invoice, the options available will vary.

If you’d like to read more about Clients & Billing in The Hub, see these articles on Fee Free Client Billing, and Getting The Most Out of Client Billing.

Client Billing by WPMU DEV is the custom labeled, payment making, subscription managing, email automating, keeper of all things in the accounting realm of your business.

Ok, it won’t file your taxes, but it does allow for including them on a client invoice.

From branding, to invoicing, to automated emails, and in-app, trusted payment methods, the features you can offer your clients (and yourself) in Clients & Billing are hard to match.

Offering both in-depth and at-a-glance views, you get to present visually customized elements to your clients and maintain them through your professional services (while we handle everything behind-the-scenes).

All that and more is built into the Hub’s Clients & Billing experience. And it’s included at no extra cost in your WPMU DEV membership, along with our 5-star, expert support.

Include our fast-growing, highly-rated hosting or go for the membership only – either way, you’d be hard pressed to find a better value. (Plus, full refunds are given if you’re not thrilled.)

Set your sites on the most enjoyable billing experience you’ve likely ever had!

Looking to expand your services beyond general web development work? Or maybe you’re learning new web design skills and looking for a profitable way to put them to use?

In this article we’re showing you how to offer specialized web design services to your clients, even if you have ZERO design skills or experience.

FYI, we surveyed our 50,000+ members and researched dozens of professional websites to come to the recommendations and suggestions mentioned in this article.

“The money I’ve made from this side business has paid for vacations and new toys I wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise.” – Phil (WPMU DEV Member)

By the time you’re done reading you’ll have ideas for…

• The best types of web design services to offer to your clients.
• How to implement or outsource the services.
• How much you can charge for design services.

Skip ahead to any section of this article:

• Top Design Services To Offer Your Web Development Clients
  1. Branding
  2. Visual Identity
  3. Landing Pages and Lead Generation
  4. Redesigns
• Displaying Your Design Services Menu
• Get Started Offering Web Design Services To Your Clients

What Are Design Services and Which Services Should You Offer?

As mentioned above, our definition of design services are services that go above and beyond your normal theme, template, or page-builder approach.

Branding, rebranding, logo design, landing page design. These are the kind of things a lot of web developers might pass on doing, and that’s fine.

But if you’re up for earning extra income, providing more value for your clients, and making your overall web development service standout from the rest, we’re showing you how to do it.

Also don’t worry if you’re not a designer, or don’t think you have the necessary skills or experience to offer these services.

We’ll provide you with various outsourcing options that still allow you to apply a markup and make a profit.

As we touch on each service, you’ll also see we give you a number of tools and resources to use if you want to do the job yourself.

The Top 4 Web Design Services You Can Offer (As Voted By Our Members)

Once you’ve decided on offering these additional web design services, the next question is what type of services you’re actually going to offer.

Rather than taking a stab in the dark, or copying what the top Google result said, we thought we’d ask a group of people who know better than anyone, because they actually do this for a living…

Our 50,000+ web developer members!

Here are the design services that came out on top when we asked them in a recent members discussion:

1. Branding
2. Visual Identity
3. Landing Pages and Lead Generation
4. Redesign

Now let’s look at each of these design services in detail. You’ll learn what’s involved with each service, resources, tools, and outsourcing options for each, as well as what you can possibly charge your clients.

Web Design Service 1: Branding

Branding is how a business differentiates itself from other entities, and what customers will identify and associate it with.

You don’t have to go beyond the basics to get a brand up and running, especially if it’s not a massive corporation.

Additional branding components can also be supplemented, if or as they become relevant.

“Start with only what’s required and add more if necessary.”  – Databoy (WPMU DEV Member)

What’s Involved With Branding Services?

The branding we’re focusing on – based on member community input – is simply creating a brand by incorporating a color palette, selecting fonts, and strategically placing a logo or wordmark (we’ll talk about logo creation separately; see Visual Identity below).

Creating a color palette for your clients brand

Adopting a color palette is integral to the synergy of a client website.

There are some great online tools you use if you need help putting shades together for your clients.

Here are just a few we like, all of which are free.

Color palette tools:

Coolors

With Coolors, you can quickly generate palettes randomly, or more precisely using their color inspector (RGB bars), or by uploading an image – for both solids and gradients.

If you prefer ready-made options, they have a huge library.

This tool is available via iOS and Android apps, a Figma plugin, and a Chrome extension.

They also offer a Contrast Checker, and an Artwork Recolor tool (see my test case in the image above).

Adobe Color

Adobe Color provides their professional color wheel tool, with three modes available: RGB, HSB, & LAB.

You can extract a theme from an image to save as a color palette or gradient.

Accessibility tools are another plus; use their Contrast Checker and Color Blind Safe modes to see either, respectively.

Eggradients

Eggradients lets you select from a number of ready-made gradients. These are simple, two-color blends, but can be helpful or spark creativity if you’re looking for basic palette approaches.

Their color palette generator lets you choose from a list of varying shade gradients.

They also have a “50 Shades of Color” section, which will pull random tones in that color family, each with corresponding hex codes.

Choosing Website Fonts

Typography and strong font choice play a crucial role in the success of a new design.

There are several decent tools for comparing and testing fonts, as well as sites that offer access to a robust assortment of the fonts themselves.

Again, these are all free options.

Web Font Tools

Fontpair

Fontpair has a collection of pre-paired fonts on their site gathered from around the web.

They have a suggestions/submissions page, with new pairings added weekly.

Pair & Compare

Pair & Compare makes experimenting with font pairings easy.

You can use Google or local fonts (shared from your device) and have up to three comparatives simultaneously on the screen.

There are lots of editing options: size, weight, color, line height, and more.

You can also change any of the sample text, and bookmark fonts for testing later.

Google Fonts

Google Fonts is an excellent resource for finding and using fonts, with nearly 1500 families – including variable fonts and material symbols.

These are all free to use, even commercially or within a product that is sold commercially (example: a logo or wordmark).

Downloads are available for families, or individual styles, and can be shared with others via links.

Additional sites that offer free fonts:

• FontBase (this is a font management system)
• Font Squirrel
• Dafont.com
• FontSpace
• 1001FreeFonts
• Urbanfonts

And a selection of premium/paid font sites:

• Adobe Fonts
• MyFonts
• EnvatoElements Fonts
• FontBundles

How Much Can You Charge For Branding Services?

To get an idea of how to price your branding services, a useful exercise is to check out what the competition is offering and charging for creation of the same or similar content.

We did this ourselves and here are some relevant examples to draw pricing inspiration from:

TechCrunch had a great article on the cost of startup branding & visual identity, from a designer with a decade of experience (including Fortune 500s).

Here’s a breakdown of what they charged:

Pricing estimates are broken into two categories, based on the stage of the business, which as you can see, greatly affects the approximate costs.

The Branded Agency is a full-service digital agency that offers services and advice encompassing all elements and levels of branding.

They have an informative article in which they provide specs to help with planning & calculating branding costs.

There is variance in these prices too, but they’re still helpful to get an idea of what the typical range is for design services.

Knowing this can help prevent you from massively over or under charging, taking your skill and knowledge level (and the scope of a given project) into account.

Of course, you can and should price higher the more you’re including in your branding packages.

Average price range for branding services: $1,000-$30,000+

Web Design Service 2: Visual Identity

A visual identity could be a graphic only (logo), artistic text only (wordmark), a combination of both, or the full complement of all.

It could be as basic as a circle with an initial in it, or the business name in a specific font, weight, and color.

Case in point >> WPMU DEV!:

What’s Involved With Providing a Visual Identity Service

Deciding on a logo for a client has varying degrees of difficulty.

It boils down to how particular they are, and what their budget is.

The more complicated or specific a client-envisioned design is, the more likely their needs will be met by going with a custom one.

The other distinct advantage to a custom design is it will be unique. The prefab stuff is available to anyone, so multiple companies could purchase and use the same design.

Just as we checked out some sites that can help with the core elements of branding, we next set out to find resources that offer nice choices for visual identities (logos, wordmarks, etc).

Tools and Outsourcing Options For Creating Custom Logos

Logo.com

All of the logos on Logo.com are free.

These are very basic, premade cookie cutter offerings, but there are a lot of them.

They also allow great variation in color (there’s a Hex field) if you need a very specific shade.

Playing with free logo customization on Logo.com.

Considering these are completely free, it’s a decent option if you don’t need anything intricate or unique.

Creative Market

Creative Market has 150,000+ logo templates for use in corporate branding, e-commerce, and entrepreneurship.

The logo template sets include badges, icons, and other elements for creating unique and modern logos.

These are all pre-made designs, so keep in mind that any number of people can purchase/use the artwork in addition to you. If your client wants a unique logo, this option won’t work.

Fiverr

Fiverr is a highly popular seller marketplace, where you hire an individual artist for any number of design elements offered as Gigs.

Because this is fully dependent on what designer you happen to pick, your mileage may vary. But in general, reviewers seem pleased on the whole, and feel they got a good deal for what they paid.

The prices range from $5 to $995, depending on the skill level of the artist and the components included.

Logoglo

Logoglo is a premium logo site. Anything you get here would be a unique, one-off design, professionally made from scratch, based on your brief.

Packages include more content as you go up in tiers – such as number of initial concepts, turnaround time, & revision allowances.

This is a great option if you have a client who has a slightly bigger budget and wants artwork that people won’t come across elsewhere.

99designs

99designs is a subsidiary of VistaPrint, the highly successful online print house.

Offerings include the level of designers, and whether you get a dedicated manager and prioritized support.

The number of presented design concepts starts at 30 and goes up to 90. All designs come with a money-back guarantee, and full copyright ownership.

How Much Can You Charge For Visual Identity Services?

Jacob Cass is a brand designer, strategist, and the founder of JUST Creative, an award-winning branding & design consultancy.

JC.com has an article on design cost, with a helpful chart on logo design pricing. Additionally, they provided a list that breaks out the costs in greater detail.

Full Branding for global identities is priced extremely high, tapping out at over a million dollars.

This of course is the elite upper echelon, well above average.

For the level we are focused on, you can see the variance goes from $0 for DIY/free logo makers, to upwards of $5K for an experienced designer.

Average price range for visual identity services: $500-$5,000

Web Design Service 3: Landing Pages and Lead Generation

The primary goal of most websites (aside from education and entertainment) is to turn incoming traffic into leads.

Offering landing page or similar conversion-based services to your clients is well worth it.

After all, they’re not likely to turn down the potential of gaining more customers and leads.

“Each page has one purpose, to convert. Make sure you have a clear path on how the client wants to convert, what is the goal that the client wants out of every visitor. Keep your design focused on getting that convert click.” – Chris (WPMU DEV Member)

What’s Involved and The Tools to Help You Provide Landing Page and Lead Generation Services

Landing Pages

You may already have a template you use for client landing pages – either self-created, purchased, or acquired for free.

If you are looking for something fresh, or don’t already have a go-to, here are some options for Landing Page websites.

Tools and Outsourcing Options

Nicepage

Nicepage offers 10,000+ pre-designed Landing pages, or you can make your own.

You can edit any of the pre-made templates, using their own website builder – which allows for drag-and-drop, no coding customizations like content editing, layout changing (blocks), modifying colors and fonts, and making adjustments for different responsive modes.

Nicepage is available for Windows or Mac OS as a WordPress Plugin.

Fiverr

Fiverr’s experienced landing page designers can create the right layout and branding identity for your page.

Expect premium quality images, responsive design suitable for mobile devices and desktop, content upload (of content provided by you) and more.

The prices vary greatly, depending on what you want, how fast you want it, and the self-ascribed skills & experience of the artist you choose. For reference, we found prices ranged from $5 to $1500.

Landingfolio

Landingfolio features a beautiful and diverse collection of landing pages, curated from around the web.

Their offerings include:

• Tailwind CSS Site Templates – Figma included on all designs
• Logos – a collection by designer Jord Riekwel, donated to the community (they’re free)
• Mockup Generator – quickly create device mockups for your app or web design; enter your website URL, and they’ll generate the mockups for you

Tailwind is a CSS framework like Bootstrap, that speeds up your development time. It uses classes to style elements, so you don’t have to write any CSS.

Popular Page Builders Like Elementor and Divi

Of course, you can always turn to page builders and themes if needed, most of which will help you create quality custom landing pages for clients.

Divi only offers a paid version of their builder, which provides a nice-looking end-product when it comes to landing pages and conversion elements. Elementor also has the capability to create landing pages in both their free and Pro versions.

Create Lead Generations Modules With Hustle

Every good landing page needs effective lead generation elements.

You can put together some great lead generating modules with our free Hustle plugin.

Opt-ins, pop-ups, slide-ins, social shares, and embeds – Hustle helps you create them all, designed to drive results and convert visitors.

It’s easy to build great looking modules in minutes with Hustle’s professionally designed templates (18 and counting).

All of which are mobile responsive and come with a choice of email opt-in forms and informational designs (i.e., users click a button and are sent to another page).

Hustle comes in both free and pro versions. Both give you all of the same great settings and options.

The only difference is the Pro version comes with unlimited Opt-ins, Custom Content, and Social Sharing.

Want more Hustle? Check out these info-packed articles on the blog:

• How to Get The Most Out of Hustle
• How to Use Visibility Conditions in Hustle
• How to Get The Most Email Subscribers Using Hustle

How Much Can You Charge For Landing Page and Lead Generation Services?

F5 Studio, a successful web development outfit that has been in business since 2013, has a great article breaking down the elements of design, and what goes into its landing page pricing.

They say digital agencies charge from about $600 to $3,000 to create a static landing page, and from $2,000 to $5,000 for a dynamic landing page.

Brimar, an award-winning, full-service marketing agency, shared these insights on landing page cost, claiming an agency can charge anywhere from $300 to $3,000 per landing page, depending on the project’s complexity and the clients business goals.

Overall, the cost of creating a landing page varies depending on the complete scope of the job, and how much work will be involved.

Average price range for landing page and conversion services: $300-$5,000

Web Design Service 4: Redesign/Rebrand projects

There are several reasons why a client might benefit from or want a website redesign. The most common are:

• The overall look and feel is outdated or unappealing.
• The business identity isn’t well-reflected in the design, or soon won’t be due to a planned rebranding.
• The usability is poor, making navigation difficult and limiting conversions.

“It is especially important for a complete overhaul (the UI might require a complete rethink) if trying to appeal to a completely different audience—e.g. if a website changes from b2c to b2b.” – Marianna (WPMU DEV Member)

What’s Involved and The Tools to Help You Provide a Redesign Service

Understanding the user experience is key. If a site’s interaction/conversion rates are a lot less than their site traffic, it would behoove you to look into behavior analytics.

Hotjar and Crazy Egg for UX insights

Tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg can provide great insight on a site’s UX design/usability.

By observing recorded screen behavior, you can pinpoint any weak areas, and make upgrades based on real-use data.

Hotjar offers their service for free, up to a thousand dollars (per month) based on what features you need, and for how many sessions (“Observe”) or responses (“Ask”).

Crazy Egg pricing includes 5 different packages, from less than thirty dollars a month, to priced by quote. Each tier allows greater quantities of services (like tracked page views, snapshots, & recordings).

Learning where customers move their mouses and where they click, what they focus on vs what they ignore, removes any doubt and guesswork, allowing you to focus on the areas specifically highlighted as ripe for improvement.

How Much Can You Charge For Redesign Services?

Redesigns are very similar to new designs in terms of the overall effort required. They involve many of the same elements, tools, and time requirements.

The only price differential with a redesign would be the additional cost of UX insight tools, as explained above.

As for overall web redesign costs, participants in a recent global redesign survey revealed some key stats:

1. Average cost to design a website (with basic features): $3,200
2. Average time to design a website (with basic features): 2 months
3. The foremost reason people hire a professional web designer (rather than using site building software): the ability to completely customize.

Regardless of the reason behind a redesign, it’s important to establishing what the expectations are for scope and cost in advance.

We’re seeing an average of $3+K and a timeframe of about two months for full web designs/redesigns. Factor that into what your average build time is and what services you will include to help set your prices.

Average price range for website redesigns: $2,000-$4,000

Putting All of Your Web Design Components Together

Having gathered information and given it due consideration, you can now construct a menu uniquely tailored to your web design services, providing easy access (and value proposition) to interested clients.

An Example of a Complete Design Services Menu:

Here’s an example we came up with, which includes variations on elemental prices, depending on the components included and expected work involved.

Get Started Offering Web Design Services To Your Clients

We hope you took away some valuable insights from this detailed look at offering web design services.

If you need any more advice or clarification about anything discussed in the article, feel free to ask us in the comments below.

There are a lot of balls to keep in the air as a Web Developer. At WPMU DEV, our goal is to assist in making that process as easy as possible.

If you’re interested in giving our platform a try, our free plan is the best place to start. It includes unlimited site management, built-in billing, plugins, and more.

For a while now it’s been our mission here at WPMU DEV to be your ultimate web development partner.

We continue to do this by…

• Providing you with the tools and tech you need to run your business.
• Pricing our hosting, plugins, tools, and support in an affordable manner, so you can grow your business.

And today, I’m excited to announce another hotly requested feature you can use to immediately improve your own sites and offer to your clients as an amazing premium service.

Hourly hosting backups for you, or your reseller clients!

That’s right, enterprise grade, off-site, hourly backups, with 30 days of restore points for… wait for it…

Only $5 a month!

It should come as no surprise that hourly backups are hugely beneficial for big sites that are always changing.

After all, having them means you can rest easy knowing that if something goes terribly wrong, you are only ever 59 minutes at most away from a quick restore that fixes it.

They are mission critical for big eCommerce sites, communities, news sites and, of course, have always cost an accordingly large amount to maintain (especially because they also need to be offsite in case of a catastrophic data center failure).

That’s when we had a thought… What if we could make hourly hosting backups more accessible and affordable for our members?

Sky high margins for hosting resellers

Currently, hourly backups are only provided by a couple of other well-known hosts in our space, including the always excellent Kinsta.

However, their price point is much higher… currently sitting at: $100/m with 24 hours worth of data points.

Now, I’m never unhappy to recommend Kinsta, but that’s a hard sell to your clients and an even harder sell for you to markup on.

Whereas with our $5 backups, you can literally charge $25-50/m and then point to Kinsta (or any other enterprise grade hourly backup service… which will be far, far more) and be offering them a bargain.

Wait, how can we even afford such low pricing?

In short: Relentless, research-based, and innovative work.

Also, this is one of those things that simply wouldn’t have been possible 3-5 years ago, so we have a ‘later mover’ advantage.

And, we’re also making a bet here, we’re hoping that this will both not cost us as much as it could (I won’t go into too much detail as to how costs could overreach… bit of commercial secrecy there ;) and also that having this feature, at this price point, will persuade you to use our services and hosting for your white label reseller work.

We want to be the host of hosts, we want you to have a great business, this is a carrot, we hope it’s super tasty.

Affordable, reliable, and pretty much indestructible (really!)

As well as being great value for resellers, our new hourly backups also “walk-the-walk” leveraging the same “disaster-proof” tech as our regular daily backups.

Without going tooo much into the techy details (you can find more of those here on our hosting backups page)… As well as on-site storage, our redundant AWS/S3 backups are stored safely across multiple devices and facilities.

Basically this means that if our data centers are ever compromised (knock on wood!), your backups will still remain fully accessible.

To put the icing on this hosting backups cake, they also use an efficient file system that allows you to create space-saving incremental backups with no load or downtime.

Now available for all WPMU DEV Hosting plans

So you can literally have enterprise level backups on our entry level hosting plan and it won’t even damage your site’s performance.

WPMU DEV Hosting users, if you’re interested – just visit your Hub dashboard and navigate to Site > Hosting > Backups… Or, My Account > Add Ons.

From here you can easily purchase and activate hourly backups in a couple of clicks.

And yes, when we launch reseller automation your clients will be able to purchase and activate this feature at a price you set via The Hub Client (and the same will be true for hosting plans, CDN, backup space and more…).

So consider this the start of some even more amazing things to come to our hosting before the end of the year. We can’t wait for you to experience it all!

Not yet using our Hosting? Being late to the party is actually a good thing. Because our platform grows bigger and better everyday. You’ll just wish you jumped on board earlier!

Check out our affordable and powerful hosting plans here.

Or, just between us… The easiest way to take it for a no-risk spin is to try our Premium plan. This plan includes free hosting credit you can use to quickly whip up a WPMU DEV-hosted site.

Enjoy your new toy!

Just some of the features we’ve added, include:

• Integrated Web Application Firewall (WAF)
• Fee-free Clients & Billing platform
• Unlimited email forwarding and 10 free email accounts
• 5 new server locations (including Australia)
• 10GB Content Delivery Network (CDN) for our integrated plugins
• New Relic, Blackfire, Static Server Cache (and a host of other nerdy tools)
• Full plugin management and templating tools
• And many, many more extra features and improvements

Which has led to us becoming the best rated web host in the World according to TrustPilot (4.9/5 from 2,199 reviews as of writing this).

True story!

Sure, we’re not providing $1.99 hosting for your first 12 months or an $80 shared server where you can cram on 200 accounts… heck we don’t even have an affiliate program.

But that’s not what we’re about, we’re about providing you the absolute best hosting product that you can offer your clients, at the best possible price.

** Update: Our hosting now starts from just $4 p/month! **

Next Level Reseller Tools

Which is why we’re increasing that price slightly at the start of next month to allow us to invest further in our existing services and support, and also double down on new reseller features that we hope will make a world of difference to you as a web developer.

But two things first; what we’re actually doing and how we want to make sure that you – as an early adopter of our tools – don’t have to experience this price rise.

In short, this year we will roll out the reseller experience of your dreams, allowing you to automate white label sales, management and even critical support of your client sites.

This’ll include domain management and reselling, a further improved Hub Client portal, and the automated integration of our hosting provision (plus Templates) with our Clients & Billing system. It’s going to be wild.

And, in order to allow us to make this sustainable, from the 11th of April we will be changing our pricing from $10/m to $12/m for a bronze hosting plan and so on through our plans.

Essentially, it’s broadly a 20% increase.

But, as I mentioned, not for you! Because you are reading this!

Lock in Your Current Pricing, For Aaaages

By way of thanks for being on the journey at this point, we’d also like to give you the opportunity to lock in our powerful hosting at the current prices:

Current hosting prices:

Hosting prices from April 11th:

Here’s how prepay works…

For the next three months you will be able to prepay hosting at the old price (e.g. you buy Bronze at $10), and we will automatically credit your account with the new price (e.g. we give you Bronze at $12). Allowing you to offset the upcoming increase.

Just use this link or click below (on the ‘lock in my current hosting pricing’ big link at the end) and you will be able to purchase hosting credits (up to a maximum of $10k per member) to which we will then add 20%.

So, for example, if you pre-pay $100, we’ll give you $120 of hosting credit…

If you purchase $10,000 then we’ll give you $12,000…

Which you can use for all your future hosting needs.

Plus, you’ll benefit from every new feature and improvement we make to our hosting platform ongoing at NO EXTRA COST because you’ve locked in your current hosting price.

Using Hosting Credits? Consider Yourself Already Locked In!

If you’ve got a WPMU DEV membership plan that comes with hosting credits, then you’re already taken care of :)

We’ve added 20% to your current credits, so you shouldn’t see a price increase there at all.

This is to say ‘thank you’ for being a member at a higher tier and believing in what we do, and as long as you don’t cancel your membership, you’ll keep these credits ongoing with no extra increase in the cost of your membership… so you kinda just got a price decrease ;).

Available For The Next 3 Months Only

So, that’s available for the next 3 months (until mid June), and we reckon it’s one of the best deals you’ll see for a while in the hosting space.

But it can’t last forever, so take us up on the offer while it’s here.

And as with all of our products, we guarantee you won’t be disappointed and if – on the super rare chance you are – we’ll extend our money-back guarantee to this (so you don’t need to worry about us suddenly turning into EIG).

The most advanced, best rated and most actively developed WordPress hosting on the web, for a price that’s extremely retro.

>>Lock in my current hosting pricing now!<<

We’ll take a look at what exactly shared hosting is, how it works, its advantages and disadvantages, and check out some shared hosting providers.

This article isn’t meant to persuade you to switch to shared hosting; however, it will offer you insight about it that you can use to make a logical decision when it comes to hosting. That way, you can know all the benefits, limitations, costs, and more, so you’ll have a clear-headed idea of if shared hosting is right for you.

We’ll be going over:

• What is Shared Hosting
• Who Should Use Shared Hosting?
• How Does it Work?
• Advantages of Shared Hosting
• Disadvantages of Shared Hosting
• When Not to Use Shared Hosting
• Shared Hosting Providers

And with that, let’s kick things off with…

What is Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is website hosting that divides webserver resources between multiple domains that share a physical web server and its resources among the hosted websites. It can also be referred to as virtual shared hosting.

Users can host a website with other domains and share the server resources, which comes with a lower cost and the exact address IP as other domains from other users.

They (users) get a section of a server shared with hundreds of users. Everyone using the shared hosting has access to features, such as disk space, FTP accounts, monthly traffic, and additional add-ons offered by the host.

The system resources are shared on-demand by users that are on the server.

Who Should Use Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is best for small websites, blogs, and low-traffic websites that do not require advanced configurations or high bandwidth. It’s also good for websites that do not need a great degree of reliability and can manage with some downtime as a result of things happening on the server (we’ll be going over that later).

Packages for shared hosting are typically minimum for features and support, but a lot of time, users can upgrade for additional costs.

Often, shared hosting is all that is required for small websites. However, if a website grows and starts developing more traffic, an upgrade to managed or dedicated server hosting is often needed.

As we touched on, shared hosting can work perfectly for budget-conscious new site owners and anyone with small, low-traffic sites due to all the benefits (that we’ll be discussing in detail later in this article).

How Does it Work?

We also mentioned this earlier, but shared hosting is where a single server hosts numerous sites. As for multiple locations, that can range from several hundred to thousands. It depends on the available hard drive space, processing speed, and RAM.

The hosting is provided by a machine the same as a dedicated server; however, numerous clients implement its resources.

Separate portions of the server contain the user account’s files and applications. Each has its file directory tree, and users don’t have access to either the root or other files.

As you’ll see, there are many…

Shared Hosting Benefits/Advantages

You’ve probably already compiled some thoughts and ideas on why shared hosting may be beneficial. That being said, there are a lot of advantages to taking a look at in further detail.

So, let’s check them out.

1. Cost-Effectiveness

A significant reason to use shared hosting is that it’s very affordable. It’s the most cost-effective solution since many people contribute to the server’s costs, and the hosting company’s costs are distributed amongst them.

You can get a site hosted for as cheap as a couple of dollars per month, depending on your hosting provider and terms.

2. Flexibility

If you have a new or small website, you can start with shared hosting and upgrade without major obstacles as your site grows.

3. No Bandwidth Limitations

Whatever web hosting provider you have, they typically will provide you unlimited bandwidth for your website per month. However, be sure not to overload the server, or your account can be suspended.

There are also situations where if you use a lot of bandwidth and it affects the other domains, your hosting provider may indicate to you that you have to upgrade your account. However, it’s pretty uncommon.

4. Easy to Self-Manage without Technical Expertise

It’s straightforward to set up shared hosting. There are a lot of providers that offer a control panel for website management. Unlike VPS or dedicated servers, it’s simple to add FTP users, compress folders, change passwords, and more.

There are no expensive tools or complicated configurations to figure out.

5. Host Multiple Domains

For the option of hosting multiple domains, shared hosting has you covered. Most web hosts allow hosting multiple websites. That being said, there can be limitations, such as just allowing several domains per account. But, some may not have any restrictions unless your account gets tons of traffic.

6. Professionally Managed

When it comes to low maintenance, shared hosting fits the bill. Your hosting provider takes care of your server by ensuring basic server administrative tasks are functioning correctly. You should expect to have professional technical support for everything, including DDoS attacks, network outages, maintenance, and more.

7. Ability to Host Dynamic Websites

When you have a website that looks different according to who is browsing (e.g. Facebook), that is known as dynamic. CMSs and dynamic sites use programming languages (e.g. PHP), which can all be run on a shared server.

8. Built-in cPanel

Thanks to cPanel, you’re able to manage your web hosting tasks. With shared hosting, a built-in cPanel can ease control, simplifying setting up emails, databases, addon domains, and more.

9. Easy Email Hosting and Setup

It’s vital to have an email associated with your domain these days. With shared hosting, having a cPanel on an affordable hosting plan allows you to add email addresses easily. Plus, you can forward emails to other services (e.g. Gmail). Many shared hosting services offer unlimited emails accounts.

Shared Hosting Disadvantages

Like anything, there are advantages – and disadvantages. That goes for shared hosting, too.

Here’s a look at some less desirable parts of shared hosting.

1. Security Issues

Unfortunately, shared hosting can be the most vulnerable type of hosting due to the fact hackers can use one domain to access the whole server – along with all of the other sites hosted on it.

Web hosts want the maximum number of domains hosted on a single server and often overlook security measures.

However, some web hosts mention that they implement domain isolation to prevent other domains from being affected if a particular site is hacked. And a lot of shared hosting companies step up their security more than others.

2. Speed

One of the major issues of shared hosting is speed. It’s due to many users sharing the server resources, RAM, and CPU – which can slow things down. Plus, if there’s a popular website on the server, it will affect all of the other sites due to the server resources and singular IP address.

This will vary with web hosts but be prepared for a slower site. However, this may not be a huge factor if you don’t get a lot of visitors or have a personal website where you don’t care much about speed.

3. Server Crashes

A common issue with shared hosting is server crashes. This occurs when sites use excessive CPU and RAM.

The more significant point is that hosting companies often aren’t quick to resolve the issue. It’s a common occurrence for them and not a high priority.

Of course, some good hosting providers do fix the problem and even ban a website that uses all the server resources. If a hosting provider has reviews or good customer support for issues like this, it maybe is worth using them compared with a hosting provider that doesn’t resolve the issue quickly.

4. Fixing Problems Can Take Longer

This corresponds with server crashes because, as mentioned above, problems sometimes aren’t quick to be determined, making it frustrating for anyone that cares about uptime.

Things can take a while to settle, even if a hosting company has the staff to fix downtime or any issues.

Again, be sure to look at reviews for the hosting company and determine for yourself if the company is good at fixing problems promptly. (And, the hosting companies we will be mentioned in this article all have good support, so keep that in mind.)

To Sum it Up…

Here’s a quick chart of what we just covered to give you a glimpse of the pros and cons of shared hosting.

When Not to Use Shared Hosting

As discussed, shared hosting uses a common server amongst many websites. The result is that shared hosting is set up to let popular frameworks (e.g. WordPress) run flawlessly with basic configurations.

So, if you want to use a custom site framework that’s not currently installed on the server, or are looking to optimize server resources for specific website tasks, shared hosting might not be suitable for you. You’d be better off with dedicated or VPS hosting since they’ll allow for more customization.

If you need root access to install software or configure, it’s probably best not to use shared hosting since you’re very limited beyond anything basic.

Shared Hosting Providers

Now that you know all about the benefits, disadvantages, and how shared hosting works, you may decide it’s right for you. Here are some recommendations for shared hosting providers.

These companies come with a solid reputation, support and are well established. There are links to each plan, so please refer to those for more information and pricing.

Also, please note that we have no relationship with these companies beyond thinking they offer a solid product. We do not — and will not — post affiliate links here at WPMU DEV (which makes us kinda unique!).

If you’d like to share an opinion or ask a question about either our view on shared hosting or these providers, please do so in the comments at the end of the article.

HostGator

HostGator is a popular and well-known shared hosting company.

Along with shared hosting, it offers WordPress, VPS, and dedicated hosting – which is great if your site becomes too big. Additionally, there are Linux-based shared hosting packages.

Its shared hosting has month-to-month plans and also has longer terms available. Their rich shared hosting packages include unlimited storage, monthly databases with plenty of growth opportunities, and email.

A big benefit of hosting with HostGator is their 24/7 customer support and reliability. If issues arise, they’re quick to fix the problem.

HostGator is a top-notch option for shared hosting, with a solid reputation for quality and reliable service at affordable prices. It’s highly recommended for shared hosting by numerous reviews and websites.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy is one of the cheapest options when it comes to shared hosting. It has a decent range of Linux-based shared web servers, plus it will include a free domain name if you sign up for a commitment that surpasses 12 months.

Also, you can always upgrade to VPS or dedicated hosting, if your site starts to surpass what’s passable with shared hosting.

GoDaddy includes great uptime (rarely goes down), useful website-building tools, and options for servers. Plus, their 24/7 support is beneficial if anything goes wrong.

They also have a solid reputation and has been in business for a while. It’s a good option for starting with shared hosting with upgrading in the future.

Domain.com

Domain.com is known more for their domains. They have shared hosting as well for an affordable price. Their various plans are determined by how many sites you have and all feature unlimited storage.

They include some free perks, such as an SSL Certificate, and a free domain. Along with that, they have 24/7 network monitoring and DDoS protection.

Their customer-friendly control panel makes it easy to use. And if you ever have questions or issues, you can always contact their support.

Hostinger

Hostinger offers some low-cost plans, 24/7 customer service, and their uptime is fantastic. They have three Linux-powered shared web hosting plans, with low cost – but a high commitment for those low costs (one-year to four-year).

They also have WordPress, VPS, and Linux Servers hosting, so you can always upgrade if needed.

A few cons are the lack of dedicated hosting, and not every plan has a Windows option. Plus, though there is 24/7 support, that doesn’t include phone support, which might inconvenience some users.

All this being said, Hostinger has a solid reputation for shared hosting. It can be extremely affordable, just be prepared to make a commitment.

DreamHost

DreamHost is another great option when it comes to affordable shared hosting. It’s geared more towards beginners, considering the tools that make it extremely easy to get up-and-running, support, and a one-click installation feature.

They have two shared hosting plans (Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited). They feature unlimited monthly data transfers and storage. That being said, you’ll need to upgrade to Shared Unlimited for email.

As mentioned, it’s easy to use DreamHost with their domain-management tools. The custom control panel gives you admin access to all of your Dreamhost products. From there, it’s easy to update domain information, adjust settings, add users, and more.

Plus, they have a 100% uptime guarantee. They have multiple data centers, redundant cooling, emergency generators, and are monitoring things constantly to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Bluehost

Bluehost is another company that includes a very easy-to-use website builder. It also features resource protection, so your website’s performance stays protected and unaffected even with other sites on the shared server.

They also have terms of use, but you can upgrade to VPS or dedicated hosting if needed. There is also 24/7 support, custom themes, WordPress integration, and a free domain for a year.

As one of PC Ediotrs’ Choice for Hosting, they mention, “The ever-evolving Bluehost is a dependable web host that makes site creation a breeze, especially for WordPress hosting.” That being said, it’s worth trying out Bluehost for shared hosting – especially if you’re using WordPress.

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting stands out for its various packages, uptime performance, and great customer service.

It has four tiers of Linux-based shared web hosting. The price varies by storage, emails, and domains.

Each of their servers is optimized for speed and they limit how many clients can operate on each server. They mention that they have 20-times faster page load times than most competitors.

They have a team of experts to help with any account migration, tote a 99.9 uptime commitment, and 24/7 support.

InMotion

Inmotion has a reputation for excellent uptime, ease of use, and flexibility. It also offers many hosting types, so if you ever need to upgrade out of shared hosting, you can.

It has four Linux-based shared hosting plans ranging from 10GB of SSD storage up to 200GB. The plans are determined by websites, email accounts, and data transfers. They all include free SSL and a free domain.

They have a good reputation for uptime and have 24/7 technical support. Plus, it comes with an easy-to-manage cPanel, which any beginner can appreciate.

iPage

iPage is a shared hosting service with extremely affordable pricing plans that vary by term. They power over one million websites and have been in business since 1998.

Some of their benefits include unlimited email addresses, unlimited domains, and 24/7 support. They also include free SSL certificates, a free domain for a year, and a free website builder.

You can also upgrade to VPS and dedicated server hosting if your website becomes too big for shared hosting.

Hosting Shouldn’t Be Spared When Shared

As you can see, there are many benefits to shared hosting. It boils down to that it’s best for beginners, smaller websites, and if you’re on a budget.

You shouldn’t spare your hosting quality if using shared hosting. Use a suitable shared hosting company (like the ones we mentioned), and you should expect quality – even if there may be some occasional hiccups (e.g. downtime). Plus, use a company that makes it easy to upgrade, for when your website grows.

You’re welcome to use this article to reference shared hosting on your website. Or, ahem, with all of this talk about sharing – feel free to share it.

** Update: Our hosting now starts from just $4 p/month! **

In this post, we’ll cover the following:

• WPMU DEV Prorated Hosting Plans: What You Need When You Need It
• Hosting Plan Specifications
• How To Upgrade or Downgrade Your Current Hosting Plan

WPMU DEV’s Prorated Hosting Plans: What You Need When You Need It

WPMU DEV’s bigger hosting plans let you scale up server memory, CPUs, storage, and bandwidth for individual sites.

If you need to increase or decrease your server needs for a specific site (and/or for a specific period of time), you can easily and simply upgrade or downgrade your hosting plan and only pay for the extra amount of resources used during that period.*

For example, let’s say that you have a site hosted on our level 5 Uranium plan (see section below for different hosting plan specs) for some time and you need extra server grunt to handle an upcoming sales promotion (e.g. Mother’s/Father’s Day, Black Friday, etc.), so you power your site up to our level 9 Iridium plan.

You will only be charged the prorated difference for upgrading plans. Once you downgrade, you will then be given prorated “hosting credits” for the amount of time you didn’t spend.

So, in the above scenario, if you were on the Iridium plan for only 10 days, you will only pay for 10 days of that plan’s usage.

It’s basically like having dynamic hosting pricing with complete control over when to upgrade or downgrade your hosting needs.

Additionally, as a WPMU DEV member, you can configure our site monitoring service Uptime to track your site’s performance and automatically notify you that it’s time to upgrade your hosting if it detects that traffic is surging on your site.

You can then make sure that your site is growing with real traffic, not bots, and make a risk-free decision to upgrade.

* Note: Upgrading and downgrading between plans only applies to our bigger hosting plans. With the standard plans (Bronze to Platinum) you can only downgrade to the level below (e.g. if you are on Bronze plan and upgrade to Platinum, you can only downgrade to Gold).

Hosting Plan Specifications

WPMU DEV gives you the choice of hosting your sites on the following plans:

Is your site starting to get more traffic than Google and the Metaverse combined? If so, it may be time to upgrade to one of WPMU DEV’s bigger hosting plans!

How To Upgrade or Downgrade Your Current Hosting Plan

Changing your hosting plan with WPMU DEV is super easy.

From your Hub, select the site you want to upgrade or downgrade, then click on the Hosting tab, and click on the Upgrade (or Resize) button next to your existing plan in the Overview section.

Select your new hosting plan to either upgrade or downgrade and click on the Upgrade/Downgrade button.

And that’s it! Your new hosting plan will take effect after disk resizing takes place and your hosting credits will be prorated as described earlier.

Note: your site will be offline while the server disk resizes. Allow 30-40 mins when upgrading/downgrading to a bigger hosting plan.

Put The Pedal To The Metal With Our Bigger Hosting Plans

All of our managed WordPress hosting plans run on dedicated servers and give you access to 24/7 expert hosting support.

Most WordPress sites will run just fine on the Bronze and/or Silver plan. We recommend choosing Gold or Platinum plans for hosting small to large eCommerce sites.

If you need hosting with real grunt and server power for a large eCommerce store, a big Multisite, or heavily-trafficked subscription or paid content sites, consider upgrading to our Uranium, Titanium, Palladium, Rhodium, or Iridium plans.

And if you need help choosing the best hosting plan for your needs, contact our support team or chat/email our sales team.