Paying Per Site For Client Hosting?
WP Engine Alternative For Agencies: Host Every Client Site Under Your Own Brand
WP Engine is managed WordPress hosting sold per site: the Essential plan starts at $28 a month and scales with sites and visits. It is a good product, and for a single high-traffic site it may be the right one. What it is not is a platform for running a hosting business.
WP Engine offers no cPanel, no WHM and no white-label reseller program, so your clients are ultimately WP Engine’s customers on WP Engine’s brand, and every site you add is another line on the invoice. LiberationTek Reseller is the other model: one private VPS, your own nameservers and branding, and you create client accounts yourself. Launch is $98 a month for five client accounts and Studio is $127 for thirty. Prices checked September 13, 2026.
Choosing a WP Engine alternative for an agency
An agency that hosts client sites has different needs from a single site owner. If you are weighing a WP Engine alternative, start with how you want to bill, who owns the client relationship and how many sites you expect to add this year.
A good WP Engine alternative should let you add a client without adding a new per-site charge. With a reseller VPS you pay one monthly price and divide it across the accounts you create, which is easier to forecast. Our reseller hosting page lists what each plan includes, and the VPS web hosting page covers the server underneath.
What to check before you pick a WP Engine alternative
- Whether you get cPanel and WHM so you can manage client accounts yourself.
- Whether you can use your own nameservers and branding.
- How backups work and how quickly you can restore a client site.
- Whether the provider helps move your existing sites for free.
Backups deserve extra attention. The WordPress project publishes a backup guide for site owners that explains what a complete backup covers. Read it before you compare any WP Engine alternative, because the answer shapes your restore plan.
Moving client sites to your WP Engine alternative
Moving a roster of sites is mostly careful repetition. Pick one low-risk site first, copy it, test it on the new server and only then point DNS. Once that works, the rest follow the same pattern.
LiberationTek offers free migration from another provider, and the website transfer page explains the steps. Our migration services team can also help if you want a hand with the first few sites. Choosing a WP Engine alternative should not mean a weekend of downtime for your clients.
Finally, keep your own records. Write down each client site, its domain, its plugins and where its backups live. That list is useful whichever WP Engine alternative you choose, and it makes your first month on the new server much calmer. Servers are in the United States.
Moving from WP Engine to Liberation
We handle the move so you can keep working.
“LTS has did a great job of offering what me and my clients need while offering personable support when I have had questions, custom needs, or whatever the situation may have been. I support several sites, and plan to continue hosting here for a long time.”
Dustin Beck · Trustpilot review
Intro price: LiberationTek vs WP Engine
Entry plans, intro price per month.
What Client Hosting Costs Per Site
What it costs to host a growing set of client sites on each model. WP Engine figures are from wpengine.com/plans, checked September 2026; the Essential plan is published as starting at $28 a month and rising with sites and visits.
Client sites you host | LiberationTek Reseller | WP Engine Essential |
|---|---|---|
How you are billed | One VPS, however many accounts the plan allows | Per plan, scaling with sites and visits |
1 site | Launch — $98/mo | From $28/mo |
5 sites | Launch — $98/mo, all five included | Rises with the site count |
30 sites | Studio — $127/mo | Well beyond the Essential entry price |
100 sites | Agency — $168/mo | Enterprise territory |
What each extra site costs you | Nothing until you outgrow the plan | More, every time |
Your renewal | Locked, any increase capped at 5% | Set by WP Engine |
Branding shown to clients | Yours — private nameservers, your hostname | WP Engine’s platform |
What Changes When The Server Is Yours
There Is No White Label To Turn On
WP Engine does not offer cPanel, WHM or a white-label reseller program. You can host client sites there, but you cannot brand the platform as yours or create accounts under your own nameservers. Every Liberation reseller plan ships with private nameservers and your own hostname, and full cPanel logo branding from Agency up.
You Are Not Billed Per Site
WP Engine’s Essential plan starts at $28 a month and scales with the number of sites and visits. A reseller VPS inverts that: Launch is $98 for five client accounts, Studio $127 for thirty, Agency $168 for up to a hundred. Past a handful of clients the per-site model is the one that keeps growing.
Your Clients Are Your Clients
On a per-site platform your client’s site sits in someone else’s account system under someone else’s brand. On your own VPS you create the accounts, you set the packages and prices, and you invoice. If you ever move hosts, the relationship moves with you because it was never anyone else’s to begin with.
A Written Promise About Client Sites
You get 15 days’ notice before we act on a client site, except where the law, a court order, an active security threat or resource abuse requires us to move sooner. It is set out in our published Reseller Client Protection Policy, and we do not remove sites over lawful speech.
Not Just WordPress
A private VPS with WHM and cPanel runs whatever your clients actually have — WordPress, a static site, a small Laravel app, a legacy PHP build, email on the same domain. A managed WordPress platform is excellent at WordPress and unavailable for everything else.
Fully Managed, With Security Included
OS and kernel patching, cPanel maintenance and 24/7 monitoring are ours, and Imunify360 runs on every client account with firewall, WAF and automatic malware scanning. Add a domain reseller account, free AutoSSL, a 99.9% SLA and 24/7 U.S.-based support, and your renewal is capped at 5%.
LiberationTek Reseller vs. WP Engine
Per-site managed WordPress hosting next to a private reseller VPS. Both sets of details come from the providers’ own pages.
Feature | LiberationTek Reseller | WP Engine |
|---|---|---|
White-label reseller program | Yes, on every plan | Not offered |
cPanel & WHM | Included | Not offered |
Private nameservers and your own hostname | Included on every plan | Not offered |
cPanel logo branding | Included from Agency up | Not applicable |
Who the client account belongs to | You — you create and manage it | WP Engine’s account system |
What you can host | Anything a cPanel VPS runs — WordPress, static, PHP apps, email | Managed WordPress |
Server type | Your own private VPS with dedicated cores, RAM and NVMe | Managed WordPress platform |
Root and SSH access | Yes | Not applicable |
Security on client accounts | Imunify360 firewall, WAF and automatic malware scanning | Platform-level security, managed by WP Engine |
Email on the same domain | Yes, through the same account | Not provided — email is a separate service |
Client migrations | Free, no per-site fees | Migration tooling provided |
Notice before we act on a client site | 15 days, except where law or an active threat requires sooner | Governed by the WP Engine terms of service |
Renewal pricing | Locked, capped at 5% with notice | Set by WP Engine |
Where it runs | U.S. hardware LiberationTek owns and operates | WP Engine infrastructure |
Free migration when you choose an annual plan.
Move Your Client Roster In 4 Steps
1. Count Your Client Sites
Tell us how many client sites you host, roughly what each runs and where they are now. We size a plan on the real workload rather than the site count, and will say if a smaller plan covers it.
2. We Migrate The Roster
Free client migrations on every plan, with no per-site fees. Moving off a managed WordPress platform means exporting each site rather than restoring a cPanel backup, so we do that work and schedule it around your clients.
3. Put Your Brand On It
Set up private nameservers and your own hostname so clients see your business. From Agency up, add your logo to cPanel itself. Create the account packages you want to sell and price them however you like.
4. Bill Your Own Clients
You invoice directly, on your terms. Your cost is one predictable monthly figure with a renewal capped at 5%, so adding the eleventh client site does not change what you pay.
What Customers Say After Switching
Real customer reviews. LiberationTek is rated 4.9 out of 5 on Google and 4.7 out of 5 on Trustpilot (September 2026).
Liberation Reseller Plans
Plan | Your private VPS | Client accounts | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
Launch | 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 100 GB NVMe · 2 TB | 5 | $98/mo, or $1,116/year |
Studio | 4 vCPU · 8 GB RAM · 200 GB NVMe · 4 TB | 30 | $127/mo, or $1,440/year |
Agency | 6 vCPU · 12 GB RAM · 300 GB NVMe · 6 TB | Up to 100 | $168/mo, or $2,016/year |
Agency Plus | 8 vCPU · 16 GB RAM · 400 GB NVMe · 8 TB | Up to 150 | $208/mo, or $2,496/year |
Scale | 10 vCPU · 20 GB RAM · 500 GB NVMe · 10 TB | 250 | $286/mo, or $3,432/year |
Get Started
By Transferring Your Website
Liberation can transfer your website content from most site builder platforms.
WP Engine Alternative FAQs
No. WP Engine sells managed WordPress hosting per site — its plans page lists no cPanel, no WHM and no white-label reseller program. You can absolutely host client sites there, but you cannot put your own brand on the platform, create accounts under your own nameservers, or sell packages as your own product. If that is what you are looking for, a reseller VPS is a different category of thing rather than a cheaper version of the same thing.
It depends entirely on how many client sites you host. WP Engine Essential starts at $28 a month and rises with sites and visits, so for one site it is cheaper than our $98 Launch plan. The crossover comes quickly: Launch covers five client accounts for $98, Studio covers thirty for $127, and Agency covers up to a hundred for $168. Past a handful of clients, a flat VPS stops growing and the per-site model does not.
Yes. Each client gets a cPanel account with WordPress, free AutoSSL, its own databases and email on the same domain, on a private VPS with dedicated cores, RAM and NVMe. What you give up compared with a specialist WordPress platform is their particular tuning and tooling. What you gain is root access, the ability to host anything that is not WordPress, and a client relationship that is entirely yours.
On a per-site platform your clients sit inside someone else’s account system under someone else’s brand. On your own VPS you created the accounts, so the relationship, the branding and the invoicing are already yours — moving is a migration rather than a renegotiation. That is the structural reason agencies move to reseller hosting even when the sticker price is higher.
Yes, free on every plan with no per-site fees. Coming from a managed WordPress platform means exporting each site rather than restoring a cPanel backup, so it is more work than a cPanel-to-cPanel move — we do that work and schedule it around your clients. Launch covers up to five sites and the larger plans cover more.
You get 15 days’ notice before we act on a client site, except where the law, a court order, an active security threat or resource abuse affecting other customers requires us to move sooner. It is written into our Reseller Client Protection Policy rather than left to a support agent’s discretion, and we do not remove sites over lawful speech.
When you have one or two WordPress sites that need serious performance work and you are not trying to run a hosting business. Their platform-level caching, staging and WordPress-specific tooling are genuinely good, and if a single high-traffic site is the whole picture, per-site pricing is simpler. We are built for the agency hosting ten, thirty or a hundred client sites who wants them under their own brand.
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Reseller hosting plans · Reseller Client Protection Policy · Fully managed VPS · Transfer your website
Sources: WP Engine plans and pricing, checked September 13, 2026. LiberationTek prices and inclusions are those published on our own reseller page.