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