[pastylegs]

I'm interested in seeing the approach other developers and designers take when managing their clients hosting, domains and renewals.

For example, in my situation I own shared hosting and VPS hosting packages. For all new clients (depending on their needs) I set them up with a new webspace on my hosting package, I buy any domains on their behalf (in their names). I charge them a hosting fee every year and when their domains are up for renewal I notify them and renew on their behalf.

An alternative is to buy a new hosting package for every client, and buy the domains through that account, and then remotely manage each client separately, leaving them in charge of the renewals (or helping them with it)


What do you do?

[wesh.co.uk]

Hiya Pastylegs (Interesting choice of username lol)

From your question, what kind of option do you think will work best for you, and how many different ways would you say, it can be done?

[rallport]

Personally, I just set the hosting account myself - gives the client 0 chance to bugger up anything - it's just easier that way. I did experiment with a reseller accounht loast year and gave clients cpanel logins - was pointless as they just messed things up and had more control than any of them would ever need.

The latter is a lot quicker for me too, personally.

As for domains, I do the same as you and bill seperately.

I've written my own billing/domains/hosting system to cope with renewals that automatically emails clients a message and pdf invoice before their renewal dates

[CSN-UK]

I'm somewhat with rallpoint, most business clients that we have created or developed sites/systems for tend to be numb to admin areas and prefer to allow us to maintain control. On the most part with sites being Wordpress, Joomla or the like and systems having their own custom admin panels clients tend to need not have access to cPannel etc.

As for the bills etc we handle the domains and hosting and as such offer somewhat of an all in one solution which simplifies the process, everything being held within WHMCS which is simple even for the non technical minded.

Certainly seems to work for us, as ever the mentality of "leave it to the experts" seems to be fairly common.

[pandadoodle]

I give them the url and create a file they can import into mail client that configures it to download and send email thats it anything else ends in nightmares. I tend to sort out hosting my end they get email 2 months before expiry and they can log in to a user area and submit tickets, pay, see invoices etc etc I also have everything managed off line via Filemaker that creates alerts etc for me.