I was wondering how many of you who offer design, also offer to host their sites? Is it more benafical to do this? Or are there more downfalls to do this? I wasn't going to offer it, but now that I think about it, it seems to make more and more sense, seems like it removes some of the complications and also seems to make more sense $ wise.

Very true, offering design and hosting is easier, and there is more money involved in it, and you know that your clients aren't going to mess up your server, because they don't have FTP or SSH access, and don't know how to run scripts. It's easy money. Plus you don't deal with all the technical support questions, as you would with computer newbies, who decide they want to publish a site, with their, "What's FTP?," and other crazy questions.

We offer design services and hosting. Having said that the design side of things are very small, we have also recently started offering programming services, so any clients who get programming work from us have the option to be hosted "in house", of course we still allow the option for them to host elsewhere.

I personally prefer to be able to get their hosting as well when we design a site for someone as it does make things easier - after all we do know our own backyard pretty well :) Doesn't work too well when we're doing another hosting company of course :D

Some of the worst servers to deal with are oddly some of the largest hosts around. They often do some pretty funky things to their servers so nothing is where it should be. If it's a regular site we'll sometimes suggest that they can get a bit of a reduction in cost if they move their hosting. It's a fairly good turnover too.

As a fair swag of my own work id working for other hosts though I generally have to keep quiet about that, though can usually get a straight answer about where everything goes. :)

Greg Moore