Running a digital agency means juggling client websites, tight deadlines, and constant content updates. The last thing you need is hosting headaches adding to your workload.
Yet too often agencies lose hours wrestling with servers – manually updating software, troubleshooting crashes at 2 AM, or scaling sites as traffic grows. Every minute spent on server issues is time stolen from client projects, creativity, and growth.
Meanwhile, infrastructure costs keep climbing as you add more clients, and scaling a patchwork of hosting setups becomes a logistical nightmare. In short, the traditional approach to hosting multiple client sites is inefficient, costly, and unsustainable for an agency.
When hosting holds your agency back
Let’s face it: many agencies today feel frustrated and held back by their hosting. You might recognize some of these pain points:
- Slow Website Speeds: Despite your best efforts, client sites can crawl during traffic spikes, causing complaints. Optimizing performance on your own (caching plugins, server tweaks) is tedious and imperfect, and slow page speeds threaten your clients’ SEO and conversion rates.
- No Safe Testing Environment: Making updates directly on live sites is playing with fire, but setting up staging sites is complex or limited on many hosts. Without easy staging, every plugin update or new feature deployment feels risky – a small change could break a live site with no quick rollback.
- Complex Client Invoicing: Billing clients for hosting is a monthly ordeal. Manually creating invoices, tracking payments, and managing different pricing plans wastes your agency’s time. Third-party billing tools help, but they’re clunky and don’t integrate with your hosting platform – leading to double data entry and potential errors.
- Scaling and Vendor Lock-In: As you bring on more clients, you face either piling them on an overloaded shared server or spinning up scattered accounts across providers. Some “all-in-one” hosts cap the number of sites or traffic, forcing expensive upgrades or even making it hard to migrate out. The fear of vendor lock-in and lack of flexibility can leave you feeling trapped with a suboptimal solution.
Sound familiar?
These issues can harm your agency’s productivity and your clients’ satisfaction. It’s not just about annoyance – slow or unstable sites can strain client relationships, and inefficient workflows eat into your profit margins.
The good news is there’s a solution built to tackle exactly these challenges.
Let Cloudways handle the 3 AM errors!
Cloudways: all-in-one hosting built for agencies
Imagine a hosting platform that eliminates those daily frustrations and streamlines how you manage dozens (or hundreds) of websites.
Cloudways is that platform – a managed cloud hosting solution tailor-made for agencies needing speed, simplicity, and scalability in their workflows. It addresses the pain points above not with hype, but with real features that simplify your life.
Here’s how Cloudways anchors its solution in everyday agency workflows:
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Unified multisite management
Cloudways lets you host unlimited websites on a single server – you pay for server resources, not per site. Whether you manage a handful of sites or hundreds, you can organize projects and even run WordPress Multisite with ease.
Choose between subdomain or subdirectory structures when enabling WordPress Multisite
The platform provides one-click operations for monitoring, scaling, cloning, backups, and restores across your network. In other words, managing multiple WordPress sites (or a Multisite network) is no longer complex – Cloudways gives you one intuitive dashboard to control them all, so you spend less time switching accounts and more time building.
Enable object cache pro & toggle WordPress multisite in a few clicks from the application settings panel.
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1-Click staging environments
No more cowboy coding on live sites. Cloudways offers free staging URLs and 1-click cloning of your applications. Spin up a duplicate of a client’s site in seconds, test new designs or updates, and let the client review changes safely.
When everything looks good, push to production in one click. This seamless staging workflow means no more panicked late-night rollbacks – you test and iterate in a sandbox until it’s perfect, zero downtime for the live site.
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Built-in client billing
Say goodbye to juggling external invoicing tools. The Cloudways platform includes a Client Billing solution for agencies, providing automated, recurring white-label invoices right from your hosting console.
You can bill clients for hosting or maintenance with your own branding (logo and colors), set up subscriptions or one-off invoices, and collect payments via integrated Stripe payments – all in a few clicks.
The interface is user-friendly, letting you manage all billing and payments in one place.
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Automated cron job manager
For agencies running multiple WordPress sites or web apps, scheduling background tasks (Cron jobs) is essential but cumbersome to manage individually. Cloudways simplifies this with a built-in Cron Job Manager (including the Cloudways Cron Optimizer for WordPress) that lets you schedule and automate tasks across your sites from a centralized panel.
Cloudways intelligently staggers cron executions to reduce server load and boost performance. Whether it’s scheduling backups, email newsletters, or maintenance scripts, you set it once and Cloudways handles it reliably in the background – no more missed tasks or overloaded servers because of poorly timed crons.
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Cloudflare CDN & Security integration
Speed and security are baked into Cloudways. With a few clicks, you can enable the Cloudways Cloudflare add-on – leveraging Cloudflare’s enterprise-grade CDN and DDoS protection for all your client sites.
This means faster global load times (Cloudflare caches your content on 200+ locations) and peace of mind from malicious traffic or attacks. Your clients get the benefit of Cloudflare’s robust security without needing separate setup or accounts, and you get credit for reliable, speedy sites.
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1-Click Server Cloning & Scaling
On Cloudways, cloning a server or site is as easy as a single click. Won a new client in the same niche as another? Clone an existing server setup – Cloudways will duplicate all settings, applications, cron jobs, and even SSL certificates to a new server. This saves you hours of recreating configurations for each project.
Plus, Cloudways’ vertical scaling allows you to upgrade server RAM/CPU/storage on the fly with zero downtime when a client’s site grows.
Need more servers? Provision new ones in minutes. You get flexibility to scale resources up or down on demand without complex migrations or contracts.
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Performance-tuned ThunderStack
Cloudways’ secret sauce for speed is its ThunderStack. This custom technology stack combines Nginx and Apache as web servers (for an optimal mix of speed and flexibility), plus PHP-FPM for fast PHP execution. It also packs multiple layers of caching: Memcached, Varnish, and Redis are pre-integrated into the stack.
This means every site you launch on Cloudways is ready to handle high traffic and dynamic content efficiently. The ThunderStack setup gives you the power of Apache (full compatibility for CMS like WordPress) with the speed of Nginx as a reverse proxy.
Combined with built-in caches, your client sites achieve peak performance without you needing to tweak a thing – Cloudways’ optimized stack does the heavy lifting.
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Multi-cloud flexibility
Unlike traditional hosts, Cloudways isn’t tied to one data center or provider. You can choose from five top cloud providers – DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Vultr, and Linode, with 60+ global data centers. Deploy each client’s site on the infrastructure that fits best (for example, a high-traffic eCommerce on AWS, or a budget blog on DigitalOcean).
All providers are managed through the same Cloudways platform, so you get a single unified experience. There are no long-term contracts or lock-ins either – it’s pay-as-you-go monthly with the freedom to scale down or even move servers between providers if needed.
All these features work together to remove the traditional friction points of hosting. Cloudways isn’t just adding bells and whistles – it’s re-thinking agency hosting workflows from the ground up, so you spend far less time on technical tasks and more on delivering value to clients.
As a result, agencies using Cloudways report smoother projects and happier clients, without the usual hosting drama.
Bonus perk: agency partnership program for growth
Beyond the technology itself, Cloudways also offers an Agency Partnership Program as an added incentive for growing agencies. This program is free to join and automatically tiers your benefits based on your hosting spend, unlocking a growing list of perks as you scale.
No matter if you manage a few sites or hundreds, the program is designed to help you scale efficiently, reduce costs, and grow with confidence.
What do agencies get from this program?
At higher tiers, you gain access to priority support (faster response times when you need help) – a dedicated Partner Success Manager who understands your business.
You can earn hosting credits (discounts). As a growth bonus, you receive onboarding discounts (up to 10% off for several months) and even enjoy co-marketing opportunities to promote your agency. All partners, even at the entry level, get unlimited team members and websites, plus access to a library of resources and training.
(And significantly, joining the program doesn’t cost a dime or lock you into anything – it’s simply there to give you extra value.)
By addressing core hosting problems and offering these agency-oriented benefits, Cloudways positions itself as more than just a host – it’s a true platform for agency growth.
The result is a practical, energizing solution: your team spends less time fighting fires and more time delivering great work.
Clients get faster, more secure websites and timely updates. Your agency saves money through efficient use of resources and potentially through partnership discounts.
It’s a complete agency hosting platform in every sense.
Final verdict: Cloudway – a great hosting for agencies?
Time is money, and agility is everything. Cloudways recognizes this by eliminating the traditional roadblocks of web hosting – from tedious server management to clunky workflows – and replacing them with streamlined, scalable tools.
The platform feels like an extension of your team, handling the heavy lifting of performance, security, and maintenance automatically. Instead of worrying about uptime or how to clone a site for a new client, you click a button, and it’s done. Instead of dreading the end-of-month invoicing scramble, your billing is handled and documented with ease.
