From my personal experience, I always offered the customer a choice upfront whether they wanted me to provide a hosting solution or if they already had a solution. This was a piece of the contract that was stated at the start.
If they wanted me to provide a solution, it really came down to what I was building and the amount of traffic anticipated. Most of the time I would set them up on a separate hosting plan, and on rare occasions I would host multiple sites on the same server. I would then up charge the hosting to them. So for example, I may have a single Linode account, and for each customer just add a new $20 VPS under that account. I would then charge the customer $35-40 a month to "manage" the server. Server management is really not that time consuming and you can script most of it. The up charge also allowed me to cover customers who may be late with payment from time to time. If down the road, the customer wanted to leave, I can just delete the server from my account. Even if I was hosting multiple sites on the same VPS I may provide a discount (i.e. may only charge the customer $15-20 a month), but hosting was always a revenue stream. You should never be eating the hosting costs though.
Thanks for the reply; it's given me quite a bit to think through. I think I'll implement some part of this system and either charge recurring for hosting and domain or transfer them to hosting and domain renewal charged to them, their choice.
Spinning up a new Linode for their level of use is overkill, but I'd like to go through the effort to keep my personal VPS, well, personal.
Comments
From my personal experience, I always offered the customer a choice upfront whether they wanted me to provide a hosting solution or if they already had a solution. This was a piece of the contract that was stated at the start.
If they wanted me to provide a solution, it really came down to what I was building and the amount of traffic anticipated. Most of the time I would set them up on a separate hosting plan, and on rare occasions I would host multiple sites on the same server. I would then up charge the hosting to them. So for example, I may have a single Linode account, and for each customer just add a new $20 VPS under that account. I would then charge the customer $35-40 a month to "manage" the server. Server management is really not that time consuming and you can script most of it. The up charge also allowed me to cover customers who may be late with payment from time to time. If down the road, the customer wanted to leave, I can just delete the server from my account. Even if I was hosting multiple sites on the same VPS I may provide a discount (i.e. may only charge the customer $15-20 a month), but hosting was always a revenue stream. You should never be eating the hosting costs though.
Thanks for the reply; it's given me quite a bit to think through. I think I'll implement some part of this system and either charge recurring for hosting and domain or transfer them to hosting and domain renewal charged to them, their choice.
Spinning up a new Linode for their level of use is overkill, but I'd like to go through the effort to keep my personal VPS, well, personal.