I get the feeling that some commenters believe I am advocating totally refusing to have anything to do with the client’s hosting. That is not correct 🙂 There is a difference between acting as a reseller and supporting your client with hosting they are the owner of.

In most cases (unless the client has an inhouse IT team) we configure servers and, if a problem arises within office hours, the client would usually contact us – perhaps also copying in the hosting technical support. If I can sort it – or liaise with the host then I do, as part of any support agreement we have for that app/site.

However, if the client spots their site is down at midnight on a Friday when I am on my sofa with a nice glass of red, they know they have access to the support that they took out with the host and can contact them directly. I don’t want to be unavailable and find that a site has been down most of a weekend when a quick call to the host would have had it rebooted.

In addition, if anything really odd occurs that is outside my sysadmin skills, we always use hosts that offer managed servers and the ability to pay for sysadmin time to fix things. The client doesn’t expect us to have those skills in house and understands who is doing this work and crucially who has access to their server and application.