How do you host your clients site?

[tommylogic]

Pretty simple questions..

How do you get your client's website on the web?

Do you let them sign up for their own domain name and hosting provider?

Do you set it all up for them?

What's your favorite hosting provider and why?

What do you look for in a hosting package?

[Toon]

Reseller account is the best. United Hosting is a good price and quite reliable.

[blueocto]

How do you get your client's website on the web?
I would normally host them on mine, until it was completed and payment made.

Do you let them sign up for their own domain name and hosting provider?
Up to them, if they know how to, I let them do it, if not I would offer to shop around and sort it for them.

Do you set it all up for them?
See above.

What's your favorite hosting provider and why?
1and1, I have been with a few, and I think for the price and what I get (on the buiness package) is exactly all I need to do what I do. They also give members offers and incentives.

What do you look for in a hosting package?
Ultimately price, then what they can supply i.e. space, mysql etc.

[PaulClark]

We provide a professional online website generator for grapic designers / web designers, so our clients are mostly designers, reselling our services to end clients.

So for us the answer is... currently about £100k of our own hardware in a colo facility.

And rising all the time

[Acuity]

Streamline.net is great - ive had terrible thing saif about fasthosts.com

[tommylogic]

Originally Posted by ACuity

Streamline.net is great - ive had terrible thing saif about fasthosts.com

Yeah.. I'm more interested in the process you chose for your clients' sites.

[PaulClark]

Sorry Tommy, I realise I didn't answer your specifics - followed someone else's lead about who/where do you host. Specific answers:

How do you get your client's website on the web?

- If hosted with us, we put the site files on our servers, and provide a hosting panel for our client to set up email etc.

- If not hosted with us, we require full payment then place the files in a download area.

- We provide 15 mins free technical support to 3rd party hosts, then charge if they need more help. Because our systems create sites for Microsoft hosting environment, technical support is rarely an issue.

Do you let them sign up for their own domain name and hosting provider?

- Yes, we expect our clients to set up the domain themselves, and point it to our nameservers.

- Yes, we allow hosting with another provider, but our pricing structure does encourage most to host with us.

Do you set it all up for them?

- The website yes; the email no

What's your favorite hosting provider and why?

- Ourselves, naturally!

What do you look for in a hosting package?

- We're obviously not buying hosting packages, but more generally what I'm looking for from our investment in hosting is to know that when I go on holiday I won't get calls on the beach to tell me we have servers down and angry clients. For me, the priorities in hosting should always be reliability first, service second, price third, and that's what I'd recommend to anyone.

You can get dirt cheap hosting, mark it up and make a reasonable margin. And the loss of time and client goodwill and repeat business if the hosting is unreliable will blow your profits to pieces.

[tommylogic]

cool.. thanks for the info man. Checked out your site, nice development work there. The page builder is interesting to say the least.

And I like your little dig at Linux: "Because our systems create sites for Microsoft hosting environment, technical support is rarely an issue" Now thats funny

[PaulClark]

Originally Posted by tommylogic

And I like your little dig at Linux: "Because our systems create sites for Microsoft hosting environment, technical support is rarely an issue" Now thats funny

That wasn't actually intended as a dig at Linux. I have no problem with Open Source technologies; we don't use them as the Microsoft environment works better for us commercially, but it's a bottom line decision, not a religious one.

My comment that develping for a Microsoft hosting environment reduces technical support issues was specifically about our customers taking sites and deploying them with other hosts. One area where hosting in the Microsoft world is certainly different to the Open Source world is that the hosting environment at any 10 different Microsoft hosts - once you've confirmed all offer DOT.NET and MS-SQL - will typically be virtually identical. Pick 10 Linux / Apache / PHP / MYSQL hosts and you could find yourself with 10 quite different environments. This means that migrating sites from one host to another in the Microsoft world is, in our experience, much easier and less troublesome than doing so in the Open Source world.

It's more expensive of course.

BTW - Glad you found the site builder interesting. If you have time to set up a Developer Account (free) and have a play with it I'd love your feedback.

[Cwilk]

We try not to sway our clients to use a specific host because last time we did, the client (and us too) had major email problems. The client uses another host now.

Tommy....Sorry, I'm on my iPod so I can't copy and paste.