How to handle hosting for clients - What mistakes to avoid

how to handle hosting and domains when you're working with clients who pays the bills do you pay all the bills for the hosting for your clients or do they pay the bills I don't even know why I haven't explained it before but today we're gonna dive into it I'm gonna show you what I suggest you do and what kind of providers you should use for yourself and for your clients so let's first cover the basics of the basics for every website you need two things one is a domain which is the name of your website and this cost around two dollars a month on average or ten to fifteen dollars per year hosting on the other hand is the space that you rent on a server to make sure that your website is life this cost around five to ten dollars a month depending on a lot of different things like speed support and features and with most of those hosting packages you will also get your own professional email address so my website is arena de Bourgh com so I can create info Adreno de Bourgh comm so you can create any email that you want in front of your domain now a domain is something that you need to buy for every website individually so that's easy when you need a new website you always buy a new domain so your company or your company org for hosting it's a little different the first step that I want to give is always buy the domain and hosting from the same company it doesn't matter from which company you buy the domain but it makes things a lot easier otherwise you have to connect those two things makes it complicated and that's extra work for nothing so make sure you buy the domain and hosting from the same company the only thing you have to look out for when buying a domain is the availability because if a domain is bought by one person then nobody else can buy it and sometimes it happens that you have a client which has a company name that more companies have and then if you want to buy the com domain name it's not possible so then you can do two things one is you can change the extension so for example change com2 org or just change the name in front of decom maybe use a - when that's possible or maybe add a word to it so that's all you need to know about domain where it becomes complicated is within the hosting because hosting you can buy that for every single website individually but you can also buy hosting for unlimited websites and this is where it becomes complicated because when you have a web design business that seems like a very good deal because then you can use this for all of your client websites right well that's not a very good idea in my opinion but let's just first cover what other people are doing with their hosting some people buy an unlimited hosting plan for all of their websites then they charge the clients a small amount per month for the hosting this is possible with some hosting companies but with other hosting companies that's not even allow some people sign up for a reseller accounts which is made for web design businesses and allows you to manage all of your client websites in one dashboard for a higher price per month than most of the unlimited website hosting packages so this sounds pretty nice in theory but in my experience this is not very practical so this is also but I do not recommend some people buy a single site license with their own credit card for every new client website so then they will also build a client every month with an invoice for the hosting and in that way you have a different hosting account for every client and then the fourth group which is people that let the client by their own hosting and domain for their own website and then they just tell the clients to share the Lockean titles so that you can install WordPress and start working on the website the first three options sounds really nice but in my perspective you should only pick number four let me give you a few reasons why sometimes it happens that you don't want to work with the client anymore at some point but the client still want to work with you this happens sometimes so then since you pay for the account and it's your hosting account you need to open that awkward conversation and then if they finally understand that you want to leave you have to do the extra work to make the migration happen simply because they can't do it even if they know how because it's part of your accounts maybe they want to work with somebody else or a new employee starts working on the website and then you also have to put in that work to mate in migration happen because you still pay the bills and maybe they want to pay the bills at some point I believe that they should be able to care rid of you without your involvement and it's a few work and it's their website at the end of the day number three three sometimes clients go bankrupt this already happened two times with two of my clients and then they simply don't have the money to pay the invoices you need to call them all the time and be like hey can you pay the invoices but since it's just a small amount you can't really make a big issue out of it because people that go bankrupt have way bigger money problems than paying for the hosting a few dollars per month invoice that you send them so that's also a messed up situation where you don't want to be in reason number four a lot of clients already have their hosting or their domain at another hosting company and then you can say like yeah well I can do the migration while migrations are not really easy for average designers because it's a really technical thing actually more than half of my clients already have a hosting somewhere so then I just install WordPress on their hosting or if they already have WordPress I just changed the website on that WordPress install we're not going to do some extra work that is not paid so that's why all of those methods where you use one account for all of your clients are in is not practical and also not really realistic another con for your client is that you own the hosting account so in that way you are even in charge of their email accounts you can delete the email accounts you can change the passwords and for most businesses their email is very confidential information they don't want the web designer to just have that power over their emails you can even leave the personal email of the CEO for example and the last con that I wanted to share is that if you own their hosting account for them it's much easier to ask those simple questions like hey every now can you create an email for our new employee or intern or can you change my password I lost it and of course you can say no but those things like take one minute and for tasks like that you don't also want to send an invoice of like a few dollars and again you can say no but but you also want to keep your relationship with your client good so that's also less of an issue when they have signed up for their own hosting because then it feels that is more part of therapy instead of your business so what it comes down to is that their website their domain their emails is part of their business not your business so this is my perspective on the situation all ways let them sign up for their own hosting let them pay for their own hosting make it simple because you can go away whenever you want and they can go away whenever they want and if they don't have hosting yet just tell them the monthly costs that are involved by having a website so say something like hey it's around ten dollars a month and then just give them instructions on how they can sign up for their hosting account just tell them that it's as easy as buying a product in a webshop because it is they just pick a plan type in their domain name that they want fill in their info and then they click on order and then the only thing that they have to do is share the login details with you and then you can do your thing and then you can install WordPress and move on from there and if they then want to throw you out they choose change the password pretty easy nobody is attached to nobody and if you are worried that your clients does not understand how to sign up for hosting just hop on skype get on the phone just tell them where to click and make them sign up for hosting and what I've experienced is that most of the clients actually love this simply because it makes them feel smart because now they can do something that they couldn't do before so now that that's out of the way let's talk about your own website what kind of hosting plan do you need for your own portfolio website so before you jump into Google and be like cheapest hosting plan possible you need to think about what you actually need and one of the things that you actually need with a hosting plan when you have your own web design business is sub domain functionality so sub domain functionality is essentially a feature that allows you to set up different websites under your main domain name so my domain name for example is arena de Bourgh comm and my sub domain could look something like this blog Trina tub or calm or shop that rainy de Bourgh com so the domain you paid for is always visible in the link that's why it's not an option for your clients websites so that's why you have to buy a new domain name for every client that doesn't have a domain name yet but for your own web design business this is perfect because you can use this as portfolio items because a nice domaine you can run a separate fully wordpress install within your domain you can link to that link in your portfolio without having to pay for extra hosting so I've already done this with my health blog that I've built for my portfolio so if you go to healthy blog a train and a board calm I've built this whole block to show my potential clients that I can build a personal blog like this by the way toriel on this whole website will be very soon up on the channel so I don't pay anything for this hosting because it's a sub domain right but it's a full WordPress install that I can show my clients I can send this link to them and I can be like hey I can do this for you and if you are worried that clients don't like fake portfolio items but let me tell you this clients don't really care that much because they only really care about if you can bring them the value that are looking for and of course real project are always better but this is ten times better than having no portfolio items right so use these subdomains for your portfolio items create a lot of different websites so you can show your potential clients what you can do and it's also a great practice for yourself to build a few websites without having to risk losing a client's another reason why you want a hosting package that has subdomain functionality because sometimes the clients are really slow they don't have a domain name yet they have not bought the hosting yet but you want to start because you are already done with the design and you want to start in WordPress well now with a subdomain you can just install WordPress and a subdomain of yours then start building the website already then when they have domain you just download all of the content with a simple plugin for example this plug-in it makes it into a zip you upload that zip on the clients hosting and then you can just move on from there so in this way subdomains don't slow you down when the client is slow ok so now let's talk about hosting companies from my perspective you have two different audiences that by hosting which are people that just want the cheapest hosting possible or which is the majority just hosting that's good that's rated good but still affordable and I think this is true for yourself and true for your clients most companies charge around ten dollars a month for hosting and I know what you thinking right now but yeah Reno I saw all those hosting companies that advertise the hosting for three or four dollars well yes that's true but those are discounted prices that only lasts for the first few years and with a lot of websites that you buy those websites and especially the emails behind the hosting will be used for a lot more than one or two or three years so what you need to look at is the renewal prices and not just the discounted prices that they advertise so what I've done for you is I have listed the main big players in the market with their discounted prices and their renewal prices for single site licenses which also offers subdomain functionality so these numbers are a good indication for the actual cost for your clients websites and for your own portfolio websites after a few years so as you can see they are around $10 a month but of course you should take advantage of those first few discounted years which I've also done for my own hosting I host with site grounds and I've paid for three years already so that makes it a lot cheaper in the first four years the reason why I put cyclin at number one because for one or two dollars more per month compared to the other ones you get hosting from the company that is rated number one for a lot of years in a lot of different Facebook groups what you also need to know is that companies like Hostgator and Bluehost are actually owned by the same company that are known for putting too much people on one server which is not what you want of course so this is why I host my main web sites at site ground and I've made a few videos about them as well I myself an on the grow big plan of site ground which has unlimited websites but that's not for my clients of course but that is simply because I have a website for my own portfolio and I have to live in with pixels websites and I have another website for one of my businesses so that's why I am on the grow big plan so my main recommendation for most of your client websites and for your own portfolio website is side ground because even on their cheapest plan you will get unlimited subdomains which is pretty nice and again it's only one or two dollars a month more than the other ones which don't have the reputation of site so that's why I always recommend sacrum but I do understand that there are people who are on a budget maybe you're living in a country where the income is not as high as Europe or America so what I've also done for the people that are really on a budget and that are willing to take a little bit of risk in terms of features performance and speed I've looked at all the different housing providers that they are and I've added a new link on the live map pixels website so if you go to living with pixels commie and you click on the page links you will go to this page and now under site ground I've changed the page a little bit so I've looked at almost all the main hosting companies and this is the cheapest that I could find so let's just see what they offer if you click on this link you will go to their WordPress hosting page and their various hosting is optimized for WordPress so if you're building with ver press websites then this is the package that you should choose and actually it's also the best package and as you can see they offer their package 4 to 15 and the renewal price is only three and a half dollars per month and that is pretty amazing why I do not recommend that you pick their single site license because with our single site license which you can find under here they only offer two subdomains which is not really enough if you want to have a web design business so this is the cheapest package that I could find that offers subdomains and at a very very affordable price actually the cheapest on the market so let's just add this to the car because this price like I said before that's not for one year that's when you sign up for four years so that's a commitment so what I recommend if you buy a hosting like this which is really cheap that I should pick the 12 month plan why well the renewal price is a little bit higher so it's around $6 but that's still four dollars cheaper than the other ones but in this way you don't take a lot of risk of course you can also go for the four years but then you will have to pay a little bit more right now because as you can see if you buy this you only pay $54 and if you click on this one you will see that you will pay almost double of that but of course it's a difference between one year and four year what's also great about hosting err is that from there twelve blend they offer a free domain for the first year so normally you would have to pay ten or fifteen dollars per year for your domain so in this way you will save a little bit more money so let's say that I want to buy arena the board to calm I click on search and as you can see that doesn't add anything to the bill it's still $54 and then I have a.com name and then I can make it even a little bit cheaper because I don't know if you saw it already but there is a little line of text under here if you use the discount code living with pixels if you copy this and go to the shopping cart and then have a coupon enter the coupon code they even give you 10% more so then it becomes only $50 for 12 months of hosting and a free domain for your first year after that you can of course change if you're not happy with them but that's a little bit technical so I would just choose like do you fall into the audience that just wants the cheapest thing possible or do you just want something that's rated number one for most people and it's still affordable then you should pick sycron I think those are the two audiences that could watch this video again I host all of my websites on psych round but it's worth trying a company like hosting or if you're really on a budget I've been preparing this video for more than two days it took me a lot of research to do this so I think you have all the answers right now but if you don't just place a comment down here below and I will try to answer all of you if I know the answer so that's all I can say for now I hope you liked this video if you want to see more videos about starting your web design business you can subscribe if you want to and then I want to thank you and I hope to see you in the next video alright [Music]

Channel: LivingWithPixels

Views: 125,833

Rating: 4.9082904 out of 5

Keywords: livingwithpixels, living with pixels, best hosting provider, best hosting provider for wordpress, hosting websites for clients, web hosting for clients, hosting sites for websites, hosting websites for free, free domain for wordpress, wordpress free domain, wordpress hosting, wordpress cheap hosting, wordpress hostinger, wordpress hosting godaddy, wordpress hosting free, wordpress hosting comparison, website hosting and domain, website hosting explained, website hosting cost

Id: sfcGejsltO8

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020