Question for web designers & developers: managing client's hosting & domains

pastylegs

With your clients, do you:

a) set every new client up with a new hosting account and allow them to deal with the billing and renewal for their domains themselves.

or b) buy your own hosting and manage their domains and recurring charges for them, billing them accordingly?

Pixelcraft

Hosting & Domain themselves, otherwise you're responsible for another company's actions.

business bloomer

Hi, in my case we provide 1 year of free domain (hosting is free forever). However, we purchase it and set it up on behalf of the client: the client is the owner, we are the admins. So, we pay the 1 year registration, after that the client will be responsible for billing.

ChRoMe

pastylegs wrote: »

With your clients, do you:

a) set every new client up with a new hosting account and allow them to deal with the billing and renewal for their domains themselves.

or b) buy your own hosting and manage their domains and recurring charges for them, billing them accordingly?

Dont get involved in hosting as a developer, its a razor thin margin business that you will very likely end up regretting.

Trojan

Almost all of our clients are on their own hosting - some came in with it, others we've setup for them.

In very, very rare exceptions, we host some clients sites. I can count them on one hand, and they're the exception rather than the rule. I don't want to be in the hosting business, folks who do it full-time are far better at it.

jmcc

ChRoMe wrote: »

Dont get involved in hosting as a developer, its a razor thin margin business that you will very likely end up regretting.

There are hundreds of webdevelopers who provide hosting services to their clients. Many are using their own dedicated servers to provide what is essentially shared hosting to their clients. It is very much an ancilliary product rather than a service as their main business is in web design rather than hosting.

Regards...jmcc

Trojan

ChRoMe wrote: »

its a razor thin margin business

I don't agree with that as applied to all situations. Yes, as a small development studio, it *can* be a thin margin business. But it can also be a licence to print money if you have the right infrastructure in place - it depends on what business you're in and what resources you have to hand.

jmcc

Trojan wrote: »

I don't agree with that as applied to all situations. Yes, as a small development studio, it *can* be a thin margin business. But it can also be a licence to print money if you have the right infrastructure in place - it depends on what business you're in and what resources you have to hand.

The other thing that a lot of people don't see is that multiple versions of the same domain name (example.ie example.com example.net etc) might not even be set up in DNS or pointing to the client's main example.ie website but the client is still paying for each of these domains. Traditionally, shared hosting has always been oversold on the basis that most sites will never use their allocated disk space or bandwidth. There's a threshold number of domains (around 500 domain names hosted) at which a web developer begins to morph into a hoster. This is the point where they begin to make more money for less effort from hosting than from web development. But for the Irish market, there are hundreds of nameservers with seven domains or less hosted.

Regards...jmcc

Trojan

jmcc wrote: »

The other thing that a lot of people don't see is that multiple versions of the same domain name (example.ie example.com example.net etc) might not even be set up in DNS or pointing to the client's main example.ie website but the client is still paying for each of these domains. Traditionally, shared hosting has always been oversold on the basis that most sites will never use their allocated disk space or bandwidth.

Just like flights in the pre-Ryanair days - some carriers still do it, but far less now that the majority of capacity is being filled due to pricing strategy.

jmcc wrote: »

There's a threshold number of domains (around 500 domain names hosted) at which a web developer begins to morph into a hoster. This is the point where they begin to make more money for less effort from hosting than from web development. But for the Irish market, there are hundreds of nameservers with seven domains or less hosted.

Very interesting figures. I'd have thought that 500 domains number would be lower, but with the parked domains, makes sense.

pastylegs

thanks for the replies so far. Im more interested in gauging the percentages as opposed to seeing the pros and cons.

Personally, I manage numerous of my own servers (both shared and VPSs) and depending on the clients needs I set them up with webspace on those servers. I buy the domains on behalf of the clients (in their names) and charge them a yearly hosting fee, plus renew their domains on their behalf. I usually also offer the first years hosting free followed by a set anual fee. I don't charge anything extra to renew domains currently (althought 10%-15% is probably the way to do it)

I'm trying to figure out is this the de facto approach or is it more common to buy the hosting and domains for each client and either manage them remotely, or simply have nothing further to do with them (until the client of course needs help or troubleshooting)

ChRoMe

Trojan wrote: »

I don't agree with that as applied to all situations. Yes, as a small development studio, it *can* be a thin margin business. But it can also be a licence to print money if you have the right infrastructure in place - it depends on what business you're in and what resources you have to hand.

Which most small dev shops will not have. All you need is one decent outage to spectacularly wipe out any profits in it.