Ask HN: (Freelance) Do you host your clients' sites? Why, or why not?

Whether I'm volunteering some time for a friend or taking on a paying client, I always have two specific quandaries: If they have their own shared hosting at, for example, Dreamhost, or (cringe) NetSol, do I encourage them to keep it? What if they're not savvy enough to add an SSH account for me to upload things through? What if they're too nervous to hand out login credentials or create new accounts, and insist on uploading things themselves? Which of these issues are "I can work with it," and which are "This client is too stubborn to work with?" I've dealt with folk on both ends of the spectrum, and sometimes I'm really not sure if I'm "bending over backwards," or just "being flexible."

The second quandary ties into the first. If I'm working on a static site--just HTML, CSS, images, and possibly some JavaScript (no AJAX)--then it's no big deal to zip it up, send it to the client and let them upload it at their leisure.

But, dynamic sites... even if I'm just customizing a codebase I've already written for this customer, things quickly become nontrivial: If they have a shared hosting environment, what if it costs extra to use a database? What if their host supports MySQL but not Postgres, or vice-versa? What if I wrote it in PHP5 or Python 2.6, but they only have PHP4 or Python 2.3? Do you charge more? Encourage the client to switch hosts? To you? Hosting clients has its own class of distressing issues.

Even worse is explaining the difference between "dynamic" and "static" to a layperson. Sometimes they'll get it if I say, "Basically dynamic is anything that lets users login and save information on the site," but even that is a pretty shaky metric.

How do you articulate these issues to a layperson without overwhelming them?