Some really good advice there, I often hear people starting up offering hosting services and asking for advice on mailing lists. I usually tell them it’s not worth the hassle it can create.

However, if you can get a good setup I think it does have some valuable benefits. Most of our clients don’t understand the complexities of DNS, SSL registration, server setup, etc, so for project clients we’re happy to host them on managed servers at Rackspace. We don’t offer hosting or email services for clients who aren’t project clients, it’s simply not worth it. But for those we have an ongoing relationship with I find our clients are happy for us to take all this hassle away from them.

All the hosting related services we offer are manged so there are 24/7 support staff behind the scenes ensuring things run smoothly as well as monitoring systems that alert support staff if something awful happened like Apache went down. I’m not sure I’d want to run a server where we had to maintain the software and security patches for the reasons you state.

We get know the platform really well so it makes development work straightforward, but I see your point that’s exactly the same if you only work with one trusted provider.

Billing-wise we just bill yearly since its easier to manage. If a client left our services we’re happy for them to send FTP details to a third party (since the accounts are locked down anyway), or we’ll just assist with any transfer away if that’s the way they wish to go. Trying to tie clients in and witholding data isn’t how I like to do business (but I know some companies do). For the same reason we run seperate SVN repositories for different clients so we can hand them over if we ever had to.

So I’d advise caution to people when considering offering hosting services. Unless it’s the only thing you do it’s not worth it just as a standalone service, but if it can support existing clients and projects it can be worth considering.