Ask HN: How do you establish hosting for sites you build for clients? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you establish hosting for sites you build for clients?

6 pointsuptown5 comments

I build a variety of small websites for clients. Sometimes these sites will require ongoing maintenance, but many times these are one-off creations that have no requirement for future enhancement. I've hosted some of these sites in my own shared hosting account ... but for these 'build-it-and-forget-it' sites with no prospect of future development I'd prefer to setup the site's hosting so that the web site owner is responsible for the hosting account and I don't need to maintain the relationship with the client. In other words, I don't want to have to go back to these clients a year from now, and ask them to pay the annual hosting charge that just hit my credit card for the hosting account I setup for their site. On the flip-side, I've found it difficult to have non-technical clients order the correct hosting since they usually don't know what they need, and it's not an ideal solution to be asking them for their credit card information so that I can place the order myself.

An alternate solution is to order the hosting myself, then transfer everything over to their name and credit card ... but that still feels like a less than elegant solution to what must be a very common problem .... and even with that solution, I've experienced cases where the hosting company still charges my card despite telling me they had switched everything to the client's name.

Without hosting these sites in your own accounts, how do you guys go about getting the hosting-angle of thigs setup for clients in these types of scenarios?

Heck, that's what reseller accounts are for with most hosting providers. Part of your business model should be to (re-)sell them hosting; it'll give you recurring (monthly) income for the lean times.

Plus, there really aren't any one-and-dones. Down the road they'll want changes; if they host it themselves, it's a quick road to making something easy, difficult.

Also, think of it from their POV: most business owners want a single POC for their website. Not one guy to develop it, another company to host, a third to do email, etc. They're willing to pay a (smallish, generally) premium to keep it smooth. Heck, I know guys who buy the $5 godaddy shared hosting and split it among like 10 clients, charging them all $15 / month. (Note: I find this a little unethical, but very profitable. Not what I'd do, but there are lots of folks who do it.)

Suggest a hosting provider / plan for your clients. In some cases you may even insist on certain hosting or charge more for dealing with horrible hosting. If a potential client were to find purchasing a hosting plan based on my suggestions too challenging, then I'm not sure I would want to work with that client for a website.

DO NOT get into providing hosting for your clients. It's not worth it. It's great if you are making decent money from your clients in monthly hosting fees... and then something blows up and your client needs hosting support when you are in the middle of some other project with a short deadline. Sure, you can get whitelabel support but the client will still be beating down your door for help.

Hosting providers make a tiny profit on each client and only break into the black by having huge numbers of paying accounts. That's not a business model you want to be messing with. Instead, leave the hosting to the people who are best at it. Offering some sort of "maintenance" option is fine though.

I always set the customer up with their own account, that they are responsible for paying for. I might lose $10/month, but I save at least that much in my time worrying about collecting, plus it reduces my responsibilities. Mosso (Rackspace Cloud now) has a nifty little feature that lets you setup clients on your account and set the rate they are billed at etc. Mosso worries about getting the money, you just sit back and profit. They even have a support service you can pay for (I think its $5/mo/domain), and throw all of your customers at. They will relay the information to you, and answer any questions about downtime that has to do with Rackspace etc, all while acting like they work for you.

I have a single box for 'friends', if they can support it themselves they're welcome to use it, if it costs me too much time or if they do something commercial I ask them to take it to a party they pay for that.

Another thing I did was to set up a free hosting environment using 'drupal' in order to get them to be as self-supporting as possible.

I understand that you're in the business of building the sites themselves, maybe you could partner with a company that does hosting and get a referral fee ?

Why don't you give your customers both the options? If you host and manage charge them a little more than what the hosting company takes in yearly fee, for maintaining it and don't order it using your credit card. If they rather buy hosting and manage it on their it is still good for you since you don't have to spend time on maintenance.

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