Reseller hosting rarely fails on pricing. It fails on unbilled work: hours of website help attached to a plan priced for a server.
Drawing the line is not meanness. It is what makes the arrangement survivable, and clients handle a clear line far better than an inconsistent one.
The test
Would this request still exist if the site were hosted somewhere else?
If yes, it is the site's problem and it is billable. A plugin conflict, a broken theme, a form that stopped working, all of those travel with the site.
If no, it is yours. The account is unreachable, mail is not leaving the server, the certificate did not renew, a resource limit is being hit.
This resolves most cases in one sentence, and it is a reason you can state out loud without it sounding arbitrary.
What should always be included
Account setup and access problems. Mail delivery from the server. Certificates. Backups and restores. Resource limits and what to do about them. Migrations in, within reason.
Restores deserve emphasis: it is tempting to bill for them, and it is the wrong thing to bill for. A client who hesitates before asking for a restore is a client who eventually loses data, and that becomes your problem in a much larger way.
The reseller backup strategy deals with making restores cheap enough to give away.
What should be billed
WordPress work of any kind. Plugin and theme problems. Content changes. Development. Training. Recovering a site the client broke themselves.
That last one is worth being firm about. Restoring a backup is included; rebuilding what they deleted after the backup window is work.
The grey area, and how to handle it
Some requests genuinely sit between: a site slow because of an unoptimised plugin, mail marked as spam because of the domain's DNS records, a hack.
The workable convention is a short included diagnosis and a billed fix. You will tell them what is wrong for free. That is a hosting question, and identifying it takes minutes. Fixing it is work.
This is fair, it is easy to explain, and it means clients bring you problems early instead of hiding them until they are worse.
Hacked sites need a stated policy
Compromises are the single most common source of enormous unbilled effort.
Decide in advance and write it down: you will suspend immediately to protect the server, restore a clean backup at no charge, and cleaning or hardening the site is billed.
Deciding this during an incident, with a distressed client, produces a decision you will regret. Handling a compromised client site goes over the sequence.
Small requests
"Just add this one record" is two minutes and there are forty clients.
Two workable approaches. Include genuinely trivial requests without comment and keep a rough count; a client generating a request a week is not on the right plan. Or state a minimum billing increment so small requests are grouped rather than trickling in daily.
What does not work is deciding case by case based on mood. Inconsistency teaches clients to keep asking, because sometimes it works.
Saying no
A flat refusal ends the conversation and damages the relationship. A refusal with an alternative and a price continues it:
"That is website work rather than hosting, so it falls outside the plan. I can do it at [rate], roughly an hour, or if you would rather handle it, here is what needs to change."
Most clients accept that immediately. Some do it themselves, which is also a good outcome. Very few leave over it, and the ones who do were the unprofitable ones.
Write it down before the first client
Put the boundary in your terms and repeat it during onboarding, when nobody is upset and it reads as information rather than as a refusal.
Onboarding a new hosting client walks through where it fits, and pricing and packaging plans walks through building the support cost into the price rather than absorbing it.
Track the time before deciding the price
Most resellers underestimate support hours by a wide margin, because the work arrives in small pieces that never feel significant.
Log it for a month: client, request, minutes. No system needed; a spreadsheet is enough.
Two findings are usual. A small number of clients account for most of the time, and the total is considerably larger than anyone guessed. Both change how plans should be priced, and neither is visible without the record. Pricing and packaging plans goes into turning that figure into a price.
The client who is unprofitable
Every reseller eventually has one: a client consuming hours every month on a plan priced for a server.
Three honest options, and drifting is not one of them.
Reprice. Move them to a plan that includes support, with the figure based on what you measured rather than on a guess.
Enforce the boundary. Start billing the work that is outside the plan, which frequently reduces the requests on its own.
Decline to renew. The right answer when the relationship cannot be made to work, and it is easier when the terms already state a notice period. What to do when a client leaves deals with ending it well.
Doing none of these is the common choice and it subsidises one client with the margin from the others.
Emergencies need a stated position
Out-of-hours work is where boundaries are tested, and it is a poor moment to decide anything.
Say in advance what constitutes an emergency, usually a site down or mail failing, not a content change: how it is reported, and whether out-of-hours attention is included or billed.
Without a stated position, every request becomes a judgement made while tired, and the answers are inconsistent. Clients handle a clear policy far better than an inconsistent one, even when the policy is less generous than they hoped.
Charge for restoring what they broke
Restoring a backup is hosting and should be free, so nobody hesitates before asking.
Rebuilding what somebody deleted after the backup window is work, and so is fixing a site broken by an update they applied.
The distinction is defensible and easy to explain: getting your data back is included, redoing lost work is not. Stating it before it happens is what makes it a policy instead of an argument. The reseller backup strategy walks through making restores cheap enough to give away.