Last year a friend asked me my opinion of the best way for him to have a website for his family. I considered all the free ones, but I had to be honest and told him that for it to always be "his," it should be self-hosted WordPress. So then I said I could set that up for him. I bought the domain for him and purchased a year of GoDaddy hosting. Within the next couple of months he asked me for two more domains! So now he has three little sites, all set up by me, at GoDaddy. The account is set up in my name, and he has paid me back for the costs. If I'm going to take care of these sites, I'd like to move them to BlueHost. I'm considering asking him to set them up in his own name, although I'm not sure. Do any of you host sites for friends, and if so, how do you set it up - their own account, or yours? On one hand it's convenient for it to be "mine," if the hosting company needs to email me or something, but on the other hand if he wants to take this over someday it seems that it would be cleaner for it to be in his name. Thanks in advance for your help!
If you want to move your sites to such reliable company, as Bluehost, I would recommend you to do the following things: 1) Leave the sites which will be administrated by your friend 2) Make a backup of your sites and move them to Bluehost by means of FTP or ask their support to transfer your site's files and databases 3) Point the site to Bluehost DNS from the side of the registrar and the domain will start working from your new server
What a weird reply, it is like you didn't even read the guys post. As for the actual question. It really depends. I have done it both ways. Lately, I don't want to the only way they can do stuff, so I have set up their own account at hosts, pushed the domains to them and then gone in their account and set up hosting and emails, etc. So essentially it is their account, but they have given me the username/password so I can do everything I was doing when it was in my account. It is much easier this way if I decide I don't want to do the work anymore - then they can get someone else to do it.
I got what the user meant. I would also like to add that if you add sites for your friends, then the best way will be entering all your data( including contact name and the email address), because if your client decides to move from you, he can transfer the domain without your confirmation ( if his contact email is set for his domain at the side of the registrar for example).
Thank you! That does sound like the perfect idea. I will just use his name and all that - then we would never have to move the hosting or domains again if he or I decided that someone else will take care of this.
Thanks for the moving tips and the advice! I absolutely don't want to have to be in the middle of it if he transfers the domains or anything, so using his own contact information is a great idea.
My advice would be to transfer his sites to his name and let him manage it himself. I see that you already have a history and since you're not complaining I assume it's all worked out so far, but my experience in seeing many other people looking after friends sites is that invariably it comes back to bite you in the bum. It's fine he's refunding you the hosting costs, but what about your time? Does the site take a lot of looking after, what would happen if the site was compromized, there was a problem at the host? You'd be expected just to drop everything RIGHT NOW!!!!!! and fix it. I appreciate he's your friend, but if you want to continue looking at him as a friend, pass it over to him, and let him look after it.
Oh I know exactly what you mean and totally appreciate it. This is the one rare person I would do this for, because he is extremely understanding and has been a friend like no other. It did sort of concern me over the previous year, thinking that if something happened like a hack I'd have to drop everything no matter what - so this year I am putting it in his name so that he could call in someone else if he needed to. Thank you for the great advice, because yep, this is a labor of love and I'd never do it for anyone else. To anyone out there whose brother-in-law or friend's wife wants you to make a blog for them, tell them blogspot.com is the best!