webhosting for customers

anataronik

Hi,

I used to create websites for small companies, but didnt create any since a year because there was no need for it.

Now I have found some customers and will start again creating websites. I need some opinions concerning web hosting from guys who do this job daily. Do you let your customers buy their own webhosting packet and you create only the website for them, or do you also offer them webhosting?

I used to develop only the websites, the customers bought their webhosting packets and sent me their login data and then I upload the website and my job was done.

msteinhilber

I used to own a web hosting company many years back. I would never get into the shared hosting gig again in terms of just selling to random clients. I do still colo a handful of servers for some of my local clients and for people I have done design work for. That's about the only way I would do it, for the people I administer the sites for - ordinary people just aren't worth the hassle when the tickets start flowing in "I can't get such and such script to work" and so on. I prefer to host my clients that I design for, it's easier for me when they run into the instances where they can't remember their credentials or if it's a new site they run less risk of getting involved in one of those situations where they find some small local host and the host ends up being the registrant to the customers domain name.

You could go as simple as picking up a reseller package from a reputable host or go with a VPS or dedicated server somewhere depending on your knowledge when it comes to maintaining a server and how many clients you would host. I don't really do the hosting side of it to make a bunch of extra money, there just isn't a lot of cash in the hosting business for small time hosts. It's more of a value added service to my customers, they have a single point of contact for both their website and their hosting so it's easier for them and easier for me.

anataronik

Thank you for your opinion, I really appreciate it.

I also think that the best solution for me would be to host only the clients that I design for, so I would get less into trouble.

For now I thought to pick up not a reseller package but more a normal web hosting package like this one eNom - domain name, web site hosting, email, registration where I can host up to 50 domains. I do not plan to have more than 10 customers.

what do you think?

msteinhilber

anataronik wrote: »

Thank you for your opinion, I really appreciate it.

I also think that the best solution for me would be to host only the clients that I design for, so I would get less into trouble.

For now I thought to pick up not a reseller package but more a normal web hosting package like this one eNom - domain name, web site hosting, email, registration where I can host up to 50 domains. I do not plan to have more than 10 customers.

what do you think?

I've never used enom for hosting so I can't comment on how reliable their services are. Generally I do try to avoid companies who primarily make their business on domain registrations and offer hosting as a value added service, I'd prefer to stick with someone who offers hosting as their main product offering. What I would suggest is to take a peek at Web Hosting Talk - The largest, most influential web hosting community on the Internet and look through the reseller hosting offers sub-forum. If you find something attractive you can also look through the rest of their forums and do some searches for reviews. That's a great place to vet potential hosts as well as find good deals, also not a bad place to read up should you ever find yourself expanding into doing more hosting or growing into a VPS or dedicated server. One of the biggest things you'll want to look for is how responsive their support is other than the obvious one of overall reliability and availability of service. Support is key in a reseller situation because your customer is going to reach out to you if their site is down or experiencing another issue and then you'll in turn have to relay that to your reseller since you don't have control over the server. That may lead to a longer turnaround depending on how long it takes you to notify the host of the issue (assuming they don't already know and are not already working to resolve it). It wouldn't hurt to setup some sort of proactive monitoring just to be sure the sites are available and send you an email or text if they're not, I do believe there are some free options out there still and if not you could devise something yourself - that way you can know about an interruption of service before your customer(s) do and already be on top of it.

anataronik

thank you for your advice and the provided link, it seems to contain very useful information. I will definitely check the reviews.