A client emails to say their website is broken. Your developer opens it and it loads fine. Two hours later it turns out the client’s office can no longer receive email, because someone at their end changed a DNS record while setting up a new mail service, and the website was never the problem at all. Nobody on your team signed up to be a hosting support desk, yet that is what the call became.
We take on the hosting, domain, DNS and email problems that sit around your client sites, and we do it quietly on your behalf. The client keeps dealing with you, the host’s support team deals with whoever you agree should open the ticket, and your developers get back to the work they were hired for. It is one of the services set out in our guide to outsourcing WordPress work for agencies.
Problems that are not WordPress, but land on you anyway
Clients do not distinguish between the site, the server, the domain and their inbox. To them it is all “the website”, and you are the website people. The jobs that arrive most often look like this:
- A domain renewal missed because the registrar’s emails go to a former employee’s address.
- An SSL certificate that has stopped renewing, so visitors see a browser warning.
- The host has raised the PHP version, or is about to, and a plugin on the site does not cope.
- The hosting account is near its storage or file limit because backups have been piling up on the same server.
- Email from the client’s domain lands in spam, or the contact form’s notifications never arrive.
- The host has suspended the account and the client wants to know why.
- Nameservers or DNS records were changed by the client, a previous developer or a new email provider, and something stopped working.
None of these are hard for someone who deals with them regularly. They are slow and frustrating for a design team that meets them twice a year.
First question: whose account is it?
Before we touch anything, we need to know who owns each piece. Some clients hold their own hosting and domain, and the agency has a login. Some sit on an agency reseller account or VPS. Some have the domain in one place, DNS in another, hosting in a third and email with a fourth provider. Sorting that out on paper is half the battle, and our post on agency-managed versus client-owned hosting explains why it matters well beyond technical support.
Ownership decides two practical things. It decides who can authorise a change, such as moving nameservers or upgrading a plan. And it decides who the host will talk to, because most hosts only discuss an account with its registered owner or an authorised contact.
Dealing with the host without breaking the white label
This is where white label hosting support differs from ordinary hosting help. Hosting companies keep account notes, send emails to the account holder and sometimes reply to whoever is listed as the owner. A careless ticket can put a stranger’s name in front of your client.
So for each client we agree one of three approaches:
- We draft, you send. We write the ticket text, including the technical details the host will ask for, and your team submits it from the account. Replies come to you and you forward them.
- We open it under your agency’s name. If the account is yours, we raise the ticket as your support team, signed the way you choose.
- The client sends it. Where only the client can contact the host, we give your team plain wording for the client to paste in, so they do not have to understand the problem to report it accurately.
Whichever route applies, we read the host’s reply and tell you what it actually means, which is not always what it says.
DNS changes, done with a safety net
DNS is where small mistakes have wide effects. A deleted MX record stops email. A wrong A record takes the site offline. A missing TXT record can break email verification or a client’s analytics setup. Before we change anything in a zone, we save a copy of every existing record, so the previous state can be put back exactly. Where a change is planned, such as a host move, we check the time-to-live on the records involved and plan around it, and we tell you plainly that the change will take some time to reach everyone, rather than promising it will be instant.
If the job is a full move to a new host or domain, that is a migration, and it belongs with our site moves handled behind your brand, where the whole sequence is planned.
When the host changes something under you
Hosts retire old PHP versions, move accounts to new servers, change their backup tools and alter resource limits. Usually they send a notice first, and usually that notice goes to whoever registered the account years ago. When you forward one to us, we check what it means for each affected client site: whether the theme and plugins work on the newer PHP version, whether a server move will change the IP address that DNS points at, and whether anything on the site depends on a feature the host is removing.
Where the site has a staging copy, or the host lets us switch PHP versions per site, we test there before the deadline rather than finding out on the day. If something will break, you hear about it with enough time to tell the client and agree what should be done.
Email on client domains
Email problems are some of the most common and least understood hosting jobs. If a client’s messages are going to spam, or form notifications vanish, the usual suspects are the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records on their domain, or the website sending mail through the server’s default PHP mail rather than a proper mail service. We check the records, test sending, and fix what is within reach of the accounts we have. If the problem is with the client’s mail provider itself, we tell you what to ask them for.
We do not take over the client’s mailbox or read their email. The work is about the domain’s records and how the website sends messages, nothing more.
What your client sees
Good white label hosting support should be invisible from the client’s chair. The client sees their problem fixed and an explanation from you. Where they have to do something themselves, such as approving a renewal on a card in their own name, they get clear instructions written so a non-technical person can follow them, sent by your team.
They do not see us in their host’s ticket history unless you have chosen that, and they do not get emails from us about their account.
What stays with your agency
- Any decision that costs the client money, such as upgrading a plan, buying a certificate or moving host.
- Whether a client should keep their own hosting or move onto yours.
- Account ownership and billing with the registrar and host.
- How and when the client is told about a suspension or an outage.
We will give you a clear recommendation on each of these, including when we think a client would be better off on a different setup, but the call is yours.
When a hosting problem is really a security problem
A suspension notice, a sudden spike in emails from the server or a host warning about malicious files means the site may be compromised. We will tell you that straight away rather than treat it as a hosting ticket. Our existing page on what to do when a host suspends a site for malware covers the immediate steps, and ongoing prevention across your client base is what our security monitoring for agency client sites is for.
The record we leave behind
Hosting problems repeat when nobody writes down how things are set up. After each job, we update a short record for that client site: registrar, DNS provider, host, mail provider, who owns each account, when renewals fall, and what we changed. You keep it, and it means the next problem starts from facts rather than guesswork. If you want to make that a habit across all your clients, our posts on keeping a runbook for every client site and handling client credentials safely are good places to start.
For site owners who come to us directly, the same technical work appears on our domain, hosting and DNS support page. For agencies, this sits alongside everything else we do on the white label WordPress page.