Neal Joseph

Careful SagePay (as of a few years ago) were a nightmare to get an account with and they had some stupid 'can't take money out for 120 days in case of reverse charging' clauses. It wasn't for me but 2 clients were trying to sort this, one went with paypal and the other I 'think' with worldpay in the end, the application was a joke for startups. Not sure on their service level, never got that far

I read that as you have to pay a years hosting if you want to transfer before a year is up, i.e the first year. Best get it in writing in a formal contract though.
 
As for not owning the design, it likely means you won't own the copyrights to the design (they will) but you will have the rights to use it for the site set out in the contract (your dating site).
 
This basically prevents you from taking the design and code and creating another, new site with that design and code by just changing a few colours/images, etc.
 
This clause is the case with freelancers too (at least experienced ones). If you want to own the site completely you will need to negotiate transferal of copyrights which will likely cost you a bit.

It depends on what the freelancer / agency has planned for this project. It's one thing to say you can host it, but depending on the technology they use, it's often not as simple as putting it on a TSO package. They may host assets on S3, use mail servers such as Mandrill ect, it can be a real pain.

One of the difficulties you may run into is support. If you ask the freelancer / agency to fix an issue on your site, and it turns out to be a hosting issue, you may get billed for that time. It's difficult to support different hosting environments, and a lot of people simply won't, because they have their own hosting that fits the exact requirements needed to run the platform.

Not every agency or freelancer will operate like this, but I can see why some do. It's nothing to do with them wanting to own your site, it's more about supporting it. Custom applications can be difficult to support at the best of times, it's even more difficult when you have no control over the hosting.

Again, it depends on what the plan is. If this is going to be built on an open source CMS, it's generally going to be easier to transfer, and the agency will be more likely to allow that. Mainly because hosting companies are already geared up for the likes of Wordpress, Drupal ect. If it's custom built, I don't think many would.

When it comes to ownership of material, that should be specified in a contract, usually the website design as a whole belongs to you but there may be images or content on licence, they do this not to trap you but to stop people simply giving the work away to anyone who asks for it.
 
When it comes to the hosting, some offer free hosting for a year, if you take it up then you don't have to worry about it, if you don't take it up there may be reasonable charges at cost for them to do certain things, an example might be that the web host you choose runs on something other than MySQL, consequently the database coding htaccess files may need to be changed to reflect this or worse still another programmer bought in to code it for them.
 
They also do this so that they have easy access to your files should something so wrong, many an occasion a client forgets their ftp username and password and expect the web company to chase it up, it's simply convenient and much faster if it's on a server you run or own.
 
There is nothing wrong with using a freelancer but there is a little more risk compared to established businesses, the obvious is the money side of things and the second is the quality of what you recieve and also the contract details.

If the idea is unique then custom is usually a better approach, rather than trying to customize something that doesn't fit your exact requirements. That said, it really depends. A custom built dating site is likely to cost thousands. There are themes such as this, you could just use the custom plugins provided. It looks like it covers a lot of the features you should need, and you can just build and design the frontend templates yourself instead of using this generic one.

I'd recommend using a purpose built CMS like eMeeting - http://datingscripts.co.uk/ - it's well established, got a ton of features, own API, templates (3rd party of roll your own), custom profile fields and lots more.
 
Or if you want to build up your own custom classifieds/dating system with incredible flexibility look at http://www.wsnclassifieds.com/ - dont judge by their web site, look at the software, it's got more stuff than you can shake a stick at.

Personally I'd open a separate account just for your business to keep your accounts easy to manage. Turnover goes into that account, expenses go out from it. Don't bother with an actual business account just yet, just open a new current account with your bank and use that.

Welcome Jack
 
Seems ive joined the right forum for cool cat avatars. The selfie cat avatar had me in stitches.

...and be very wary of any host that offers "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth, more often than not there will be severe restrictions that could either see your account suspended, or terminated unless you upgrade.
 
There are many excellent UK based web hosts, have a search through these forums as it's been discussed many time