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Client Hosting

Anything considered a "hustle" and not necessarily a CENTS-based Fastlane

Taz

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Quick question guys, I run a web design service for various clients. Before I start getting a ton of customers (hopeful), I want to ask if its smarter to host them on my server with siteground or create a separate account for them?
 
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DrScream

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Always set them up on their own hosting plans. Include that in the setup costs.
 

DrScream

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Why's that.
Just as a precaution. If you and the client have a falling out they have the ability to just hire another designer. This was taught to me by another web designer. Take it with a grain of salt as I've only ever made websites for about 15-20 people.

Another thing you could try to do to double-dip is to become an affiliate for X site and then when you set up the hosting you earn a commission off the sales.
 
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George Appiah

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Ask yourself... do you want to be in the hosting business, even as a reseller?

There's no right or wrong answer here... but if you position yourself as the host of record to your clients, you should be willing, able and ready to handle hosting-related support requests.

If you're unwilling or unable to do this, take the referral/affiliate fee and let your customers pay for the hosting themselves. I don't know about Siteground or even what kind of hosting you have with them, but some hosts allow you to setup a new customer in a staging environment, and when you're done, push the finished site to the client to create their own account and pay for it to go live.

Even if you want to be the host of record, you still want to isolate accounts as much as possible. Again, some hosts allow you to have sub-accounts under one master/partner/reseller account and bill... but isolated from each other with individual client logins.

If you want to go the hosting route, please take a look and learn from this gentleman Austin Ginder (of Anchor Hosting), a web designer who started hosting sites for his clients and eventually transitioned into hosting and managing sites for clients and other agencies (he uses Kinsta & WPEngine):

IndieHacker Interview: Bootstrapping My Daydream into a $20K/Month Business

His Financials, 100% Open: https://anchor.host/calculate-arr/
 

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