Many agencies build websites well and host them badly, or not at all. Sites sit on a mix of accounts, plugins fall behind on updates and nobody owns incident response. Managed hosting through a partner can fix that, but only if the arrangement is clear. These are the questions worth asking before any site moves.
1. Who owns what?
Ask in writing who owns the domain, the hosting account, the code, the content and the backups. The agency and its client should be able to reach their site whether or not they stay with the host. A partner who is vague here is creating lock-in.
2. How are incidents handled?
Uptime numbers are less informative than process. Ask how problems are detected, who is alerted, how fast someone responds and how the agency is kept informed. Ask what the partner does at night and on weekends. For agencies, the useful promise is not “we monitor” but “we own the incident and tell you what happened”.
3. How do migrations work?
Moving a client site is where most hosting relationships are won or lost. Ask whether the partner builds a staging copy first, how they test it, how DNS is switched, what the rollback plan is and who checks email, forms and integrations. Email routing tied to DNS is a classic source of avoidable outages. Our website migration process covers these steps in detail, and the choice between moving and rebuilding is explained in CMS migration or full website rebuild.
4. What happens with backups and restores?
A backup is only useful if it can be restored. Ask how often backups run, where they are stored, how long they are kept and whether restores are tested. Ask how long a typical restore takes.
5. How are updates and security handled?
Ask who applies core, theme and plugin updates, how they are tested before production and what happens if an update breaks a page. Ask how malware and suspicious activity are detected and cleaned.
6. What is excluded from support?
Every managed plan has limits. Ask whether content edits, design changes, plugin conflicts, third-party scripts and custom code are covered. Knowing the edge of the service early avoids arguments later.
7. How does staging work?
A good partner gives each site a staging area and a clear process for pushing changes live. Ask who can use it and whether the agency can work on it directly.
8. What about performance?
Ask what caching and delivery setup is used and how performance is checked. Our free PageScore tool is a simple way to see a baseline before and after a move.
9. How does the white-label arrangement look to the client?
Ask how support requests reach the partner, who replies to the client and whether branding is yours throughout. The goal is that the client sees one responsible agency.
10. What if you leave?
Ask how offboarding works: how fast sites can be exported, whether data comes with them and whether there are fees. A confident partner answers this easily.
What CoderCorn does
CoderCorn currently runs 137 websites on its managed hosting, and our hosting clients renew at a rate of 99 percent. The managed hosting for agencies page explains how we split responsibilities between your team and ours, and the general web hosting page covers the service itself. If you want a neutral view of an existing site first, a human-reviewed Website Diagnostic can show what a move would involve.
Frequently asked
- What is white-label managed hosting for agencies?
- It is hosting and maintenance delivered by a partner under the agency's own relationship with the client. The agency keeps the client contact and the partner handles servers, updates, backups, monitoring and fixes in the background.
- What should an agency ask a managed hosting partner first?
- Ask who owns the accounts and data, how incidents are handled and communicated, how migrations are done, how backups and restores work and what is excluded from support. These answers show how the partner behaves under pressure.
- Can I move client sites to a new host without downtime?
- Often with planning. A careful migration uses a staging copy, a tested DNS switch and a rollback plan. Email and DNS dependencies are the usual sources of surprise, so they should be checked first.
- Who owns the client website when hosting is managed by a partner?
- That should be written down. Clients and agencies should be able to access their code, content and domain whether or not they continue with the host.