Every web designer has asked themselves this question at one point or another. There are a number of options available which all have benefits and downsides.
Get the client to arrange for web hosting in their own name before starting the project?
This seems to be the lowest risk and cost for you the web designer, but even with clients that currently have a website, this might be a serious hurdle:
- The client may not be ready to think about hosting costs and this will distract them from more important decisions about their website
- What if the project stalls and the client doesn’t want to or accidentally doesn’t pay the hosting bill? Who will backup and restore the half finished website?
- Whats the effort required to switch from a temporary website to the live site? Who will set up DNS records for the temporary website?
- If the client wants to save costs and develop the new website in a sub folder of the existing site, who is responsible if any of the 2 sites get hacked or the server overloaded?
Have dedicated development sites on your own hosting space
This seems a much better option and eliminates most of the problems with the client organising the hosting.
There still is a problem paying for hosting if the project stalls and the associated cost tradeoff in regards to backup and restore of a half finished site.
Also, you may know that the site has to go onto a high performance hosting provider or at least suspect it. In this case there will be some transfer cost incurred when moving the site the final hosting provider or you or the client will have to fork out the cost of high performance hosting during development.
How we solve this problem at Managed Hosting Partners for you the Web Designer
We quickly identified moving websites to our platform to be much more time intensive that setting up fresh websites in the first place.
As a result, we are offering all reseller partners free hosting of websites in development. You can use our development domain “demohub.site” during development and we will provide secure certificates during development, so that the site is running as close to the final configuration as possible. Such websites in development are automatically password protected and block search engines, so they don’t interfere with any existing websites a client may have.
When the website is finished, we transfer it over to its final domain and remove the password protection for you.
