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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?
- noodle 17y agoi've tried both, and i now no longer attempt to host client's sites. i'll do it on request or on certain occasions, but i find that the money you make from hosting doesn't tend to offset the time and the headaches that come from having to deal with it.
- byoung2 17y agoI always host clients' sites. In the past it was such a nightmare dealing with all of the various shared hosting companies that I made the decision to only work with clients who agreed to my hosting. The way I did that is by offering subscription billing for the site, so instead of paying one huge upfront fee, clients pay a setup fee and then a monthly ongoing charge that covers hosting and maintenance. If you want to keep your own hosting, there is an additional charge for setup, and you still pay the same rate, so no one ever opted for that. Now that I host on The Rackspace Cloud, Rackspace handles technical support for $3/mo/domain (US-based), and basic website maintenance is handled transparently in the Philippines.
- RobGR 17y agoI have hosted some sites, and I don't mean hosted as in put them on a machine that Rackspace or someone else hosted, I mean hosted as in I put their computer in my closet on the business class cable modem I have. It all depends on the client and the site. For high traffic sites where the client has money, I direct them toward other hosting, or getting their own internet connection to their office that can host it. I do have a server with a lot of one-off projects on it that never took off and got to the point where the client invested in a real setup, various startups that never proceeded past the web site stage.