A few months ago, I attend WordCamp in Raleigh. One of the earliest sessions discussed how to turn this whole web design and development hobby into an actual, pay-the-bills kind of job. The head of that session explained that he handles the hosting for most of his clients – not actually physically hosting their sites on his own machines, but he purchases and administers the remote hosting from reputable third party companies and passes along the cost to the client.
At the time, the only think I could think is why would a client pay you $60 a month when they could easily set up a hosting account for somewhere around a fifth of that cost. It felt, frankly, like a little bit of a money grab and was, in all fairness, explained as a great source of passive income. I quickly forgot about that as an option and moved on.
Fast forward to the last three weeks, during which I have fought tooth and nail for clients to give me access to their FTP and hosting accounts so that I could make significant changes to websites. (P.S. why does everyone suddenly want a website facelift in January? Is this a new resolution trend, like going to the gym more and trying not to eat exclusively from the office snack machine?)
The first client involves a third-party go-between who doesn’t understand exactly how this all works. The second client hosts their site themselves and was extremely hesitant to give me access to their servers. Because of these back and forth and a general misunderstanding of how websites actually work, I am now three weeks behind on at least one of those projects.
And so I say to you, person who wants someone else to handle their website, please allow me to handle not only the design and development, but also the hosting. I promise I won’t gouge you on prices, and you get the added benefit of me being the person that handles server issues, instead of someone in IT, or even you yourself.