How are you managing your client hosting services

Hi,

I have been using 247-host for the last two years which is probably the cheapest reseller company I could find back then, the service is good for small sites that don’t rely on the web site to do business but for sites that really depend on it and require 99.99 up time this wouldn’t be a good choice in fact I already changed one of my sites to a different host company (host9 very good company) because of the down time issues with this company and some other incidents I had like a lost database which they could restore after a hardware failure, I know this was part of my problem for not having a back up myself, anyways I would like to hear from people with more experience on how to manage you clients hosting services. The way I’m currently doing it is this…

I charge the client $100 dollars for one year of hosting and domain name services so the client doesn’t have to worry about any anything except give me the money and I usually renew these services for them. I try to monitor the sites in a regular bases and if I see something is wrong I just go and fix it, for instance if the site gets hacked I usually go-ahead and fix it without even letting the customer know about the problem.

1-What was your first hosting company and what kind of service did you provide to your customers?

2-Were you using a reseller package or were you buying individual hosting packages as needed or were you letting the customers deal with these type of services?

3-Were you trying to make some money providing these services?

4-What was included with these services, were you in charge of the backups and restores if something would happen to the site like a hacked site?

Can you guys share your experiences as to how you guys are handling hosting and may be domain services for your clients?

Thanks a lot!

Your post is not clear - are you a reseller or you are just purchasing hosting for your customers or what … ?

You know what, you are right Im reading it and its confusing Im probably in the wrong forum, this would probably make more sense if this would be in the web design forum since Im a web designer trying to find a better way to handle my clints web hosting services for new clients that dont already have these services and they want you the designer to handle this. Sorry!

1. What was your first hosting company and what kind of service did you provide to your customers?
You mean the first hosting company I’ve used myself? Oh, that was a long time ago but I believe it was a very popular Swedish company called Loopia. It’s still one of Sweden’s best as far as I’m aware. It was very fast but expensive shared hosting and it didn’t come with MySQL, which was very disappointing since I had to build all my stuff flat-file.

Anyway, it didn’t really matter to me since I did just hobby stuff back then so it’s probably not relevant to this discussion. I later signed one of my clients up with the same provider and he never had any issues with it. But we’re talking shared hosting now so let’s move on.

2. Were you using a reseller package or were you buying individual hosting packages as needed or were you letting the customers deal with these type of services?
At the time, I let clients deal with these kinds of services, except for the one exception I mentioned above where I signed him up.

3. Were you trying to make some money providing these services?
No, I was not.

4. What was included with these services, were you in charge of the backups and restores if something would happen to the site like a hacked site?
Pass.

Can you guys share your experiences as to how you guys are handling hosting and may be domain services for your clients?
I have a policy (I hate the word but there’s no better way of describing it) to not offer hosting services to my clients, or handle hosting for them. That is strictly their business to take care of. I’m run a web production business—producing stuff is what I do, not hosting it, for practical and financial reasons.

Practical: I don’t want to have to deal with support. Website maintenance is enough hassle, I don’t want to add email/FTP/you-name-it support to the list.

Financial: It doesn’t make financial sense to me to offer hosting packages. At my regular hourly rate, if I get a few phone calls per month regarding email accounts, I really wouldn’t make any money from it—if you want to look at it that way.

I love doing server administration, for myself, and I hate support so most of all I guess it’s a matter of wanting to do it or not. I don’t, so I don’t.

I guess if you’re really a full-service agency it can feel great to offer it all to your clients but my business does production-only. That said, there are no rules set in stone so of course there are exceptions. I think I host three client sites right now but they are loyal and reliable, and won’t give me any trouble. They’re people I’ve known for a while.

Same goes for domains—I don’t handle those for client but there are exceptions. I hold on to a few domains for one client, and I’ve registered a handful as a gift to another client.

Hmmm, very interesting! Thanks a lot for your comments.

1-What was your first hosting company and what kind of service did you provide to your customers?
My very first hosting company was Westhost, and have since used Site5, Hostgator, Hostdime and Servint. I found all of them to be good overall. Modern hosting works pretty well, and there are fewer problems these days due to the maturity of the business.

2-Were you using a reseller package or were you buying individual hosting packages as needed or were you letting the customers deal with these type of services?
I specialize in web development, not hosting. I don’t want to get spread thin doing things that get too far from my core business of selling software and developing websites.

3-Were you trying to make some money providing these services?
I make excellent money through referrals. No need to sell hosting, when I can get paid with affiliate programs.

4-What was included with these services, were you in charge of the backups and restores if something would happen to the site like a hacked site?
Again, hosting is not my core business, and most hosts are pretty good these days. We tell all our customers to make backups and change passwords often. We also take backups before starting any work.

3-Were you trying to make some money providing these services?
I make excellent money through referrals. No need to sell hosting, when I can get paid with affiliate programs.

This sounds like a good idea!

Thanks a lot for your comments.

I just like to build websites and get jobs done with, I offer 90 day guarantees but basically it is nice to finish a job and get paid and be done.

If I offer hosting then I am stuck dealing with the site and most of my clients are cheap and never want to spend money so I would be dealing with all sorts of stuff for free.

New email accounts, clients that want to work on their own sites and mess them up and then blame the hosting, Billing clients… Not getting paid. billing them again, can I pay you next month ? Do I take down the site?
All for $70-$80 a year ?

No thanks… I would rather get an affiliate payment and let someone else do the job of hosting.

I like the way you’re taking the all-inclusive approach. I think that’s where a lot of companies fall short. It just adds unnecessary work and stress onto the client, and I don’t think that makes for a very enjoyable business relationship. Let me ask you this: are you using any sort of CRM tool? This make not only make life easier for the client, but also significantly easier for you. A good CRM tool will allow you to communicate with the client, keep track of all their information, and invoice them.

1-What was your first hosting company and what kind of service did you provide to your customers?
The first hosting company I ever used was F5Hosting. I originally used them to host a personal site, and then I got hooked on technology and opened a web site hosting service.

2-Were you using a reseller package or were you buying individual hosting packages as needed or were you letting the customers deal with these type of services?

I was using a bulk reseller package, that assigned my a large amount of space and bandwidth, and I was able to divide it up to my customers as necessary.
3-Were you trying to make some money providing these services?
That was the goal.

4-What was included with these services, were you in charge of the backups and restores if something would happen to the site like a hacked site?
It was all included, however I didn’t proactively monitor client sites.

I use a German host (hosteurope.de) and have been with them for many, many years. I have not, do not, and will not provide hosting for my customers. One reason being that the majority of my customers aren’t local, they come from all over the world and thus I find it sensible to assist them in finding a good hosting solution based on their specific needs (e.g. based on their location/their target audience’s location, to name one factor). Another reason is that I prefer giving my clients the freedom to host their sites themselves (or have it hosted, rather) and not have them have the feeling they’re dependent on me. Should things ever go wrong, they’d know that they’re free to switch hosts or terminate a work relationship without hassle.

Thank you all very much for your comments.

Maybe because I like Server Administration, but I’m going to be hosting my future projects on a local Dell Box in my house. Sure it’s going to take more work, but I will have the freedom to customize my Server to my liking. Much cheaper then RackSpace. Also, with my Cable Modem, I have unlimited data transfer, alot of storage on my Box with multiple HD’s, and 3 MB speed.

Good Topic.

1-What was your first hosting company and what kind of service did you provide to your customers?
It is a while since I setup my first hosting, guess it was in the middle of the 90is. Cant remember the name of the company, was a local norwegian based company. Since then Ive been testing multiple hosting companies, everything from shared, VPS and dedicated to locate a company that could provide a good solution for our needs and one that I could offer to our customers.

We mainly provide web programming services, while we handle most of our clients websites, we dont handle the hosting.

2-Were you using a reseller package or were you buying individual hosting packages as needed or were you letting the customers deal with these type of services?
Sometimes its not in your best interest to try to cover too many areas, its better to focus on what you know and excel in that area.

We dont offered hosting to our customers, instead we recommend where they can/should get their hosting. Note. If you go this route its vital you actually believe in and trust the company you recommend for the customer, its much easier to sell something if you really believe in it.

3-Were you trying to make some money providing these services?
Nothing else than using the affiliate solution available through the host.

4-What was included with these services, were you in charge of the backups and restores if something would happen to the site like a hacked site?
We dont offer any set serviced for hosting, but many of our clients prefer to contact us if they need an email setup, get something changed on the server etc. We then bill the customer at a hourly rate.

The company we use is Liquid Web, they are not the cheapest one on the marked. But if your tired of reaching a call center in India when you call support, need a response time on a few minutes or need a uptime on 100% their a good choice. (Note, we have only used their dedicated services, I am not sure if the shared hosting and VPS is at the same standard).

1-What was your first hosting company and what kind of service did you provide to your customers?
I’m in New Zealand, so it probably doesn’t make much sense talking about NZ companies as you’re probably never going to do business with them. But I use an NZ company called iServe. I chose them because they’re based in NZ and if there are ever any problems then I can phone them without having to worry about time differences, etc. They cost more than the cheap hosting companies in the USA, but in my opinion it’s worth paying the extra to get the fantastic support they offer (other than being their client for several years I have no affiliation with them).

2-Were you using a reseller package or were you buying individual hosting packages as needed or were you letting the customers deal with these type of services?

I used a reseller package where I received a certain amount of disk space and I could add as many websites as I wanted.

3-Were you trying to make some money providing these services?

Most certainly I was trying to make some extra money, that’s the reason I’m in business! :slight_smile: Providing hosting has been one of the best things I’ve ever done, income-wise. I get my clients to set up an automatic payment every month into my bank account and I don’t have to do anything to earn the money as the hosting company does everything. NZ$20 / client / month - sweet!

4-What was included with these services, were you in charge of the backups and restores if something would happen to the site like a hacked site?

The hosting company does daily backups and handle all the servers and everything. I set up the client’s email, but usually that’s a one-off thing.

I must say that if you’re regularly having to deal with hacked sites then your hosting company needs a kick in the pants to keep on top of their security. Sure it happens occasionally (it’s happened once to me in the last 10 years), but it shouldn’t be a regular occurrence!

I find that by offering to handle the hosting then I’m offering a more attractive service to my clients. Most of my clients are small businesses and they don’t really know enough to register a domain name let alone sign up for hosting and manage files, etc. Being a one-stop-shop that offers to register the domain name, create the website, set up their email and arrange hosting makes things much easier for my clients. I can’t imagine creating a website and just handing the files over to the client, they wouldn’t know what to do with them! :slight_smile: This also enables me to keep in regular contact with my clients and to regularly update their sites, which of course is chargeable work.

Thank you all very much!

I dont host any of my client websites. I just redirect them to the hosting which am using through affiliates. I just build apps and websites for them.

Recently, I have been taking care of my client’s hosting for a fee. I charge for a “Whole Package” I do web site design, domain registration, WhoIS protect, and Install SSL’s if they are running an E-Commerce store.

Under this format I can bill businesses a total for the year, or they can subscribe to monthly hosting payments.

3-Were you trying to make some money providing these services?
Of course! I don’t work for businesses for free! Skill sets are valuable in today’s market!

4-What was included with these services, were you in charge of the backups and restores if something would happen to the site like a hacked site?
I take manual backups on all my sites regularly. I take a back up once the initial design is done. I keep a set of the files and I send the user a set of files in case they ever want to use them somewhere else. After initial design there are not many changes to be backed up for most of my clients.

[FONT=“Georgia”]Still figurig this out.

A couple times, I referred clients to the host and domain registrar and had them do it so everything would remain under their names.

Other times I decided that it would be more hassle to instuct the client on what to do than to just do it myself and add the hosting cost to my bill as reembursement.

Now-a-days I’m considering upgrading my hosting account then offering hosting “for free” for the first year (having their websites hosted on my server). There’ll still be clients who’d have particularly heavy traffic though, and I’d want them on their own servers. So… still figuring this out.

I’ve also had ones who already had hosts. Those sometimes turn into an adventure. Windows server? Oh boy.

[/FONT]

Yeah it is a hassle to instruct non technically savvy business owners to set up hosting.

I like the idea of offering a “Free Year of Hosting.” That offer sounds too good to refuse if you are in the market for web design. I like the way you think!

I’ve been offering hosting as part of my web development services for a number of years.

I started because one of my first clients wanted database support and that was then expensive. It didn’t cost that much more to pay for a re-seller account.

My main motive for offering the hosting service is to make my clients’ lives easier. I make it clear that the price does not include any more than minimal support - and generally no support is needed.

I can’t recall that any of my clients’ sites have been hacked.

I did quite a lot of research for my first hosting company and settled on CWCS in Nottingham (I’m UK based). They claim to support web developers in particular. Their support team is first class. I’ve changed package but I’ve had no cause to think seriously about changing to another provider.

I make some money from hosting but I regard it as an “optional extra” - it’s not key to my business.

I do not, as a general rule, get involved with backups - that’s up to my clients. They have access to a control panel.