Question about reselling

[DrMarie]

Thanks to you wonderful people who love to help, I have managed to get up a really nice veterinary advice website and have made a site for 3 of my friend's businesses. I am thinking of making the transition to doing some freelance work for actual cash!

I understand that it is best for me to buy a reseller hosting account. However, do most people who do web design resell domain names? If not, do you usually include registering the domain name in your quoted price? How long do you usually register the name for?

Thanks!
Marie

[aj_nsc]

You don't need to "buy" a reseller hosting account, depending on where you look. My host of choice is ICDsoft.com, they offer free reseller accounts and while the first account you sign up costs you the same as their listed prices for hosting, resellers get discounts (that you obviously don't have to disclose to your clients) for every extra account that you sign up.

Don't worry about "including" the price of domain registration and hosting, you only have to "include" this if your charge(s) on your invoices to your clients aren't itemized. Typically, my invoices look like this:

Design $XXX.XX
Content Updating/Maintenance $XXX.XX
Hosting + Domain $XXX.XX (for X years)

I also usually make it clear to my clients what the hosting + domain will cost them per year and after I finish building their site, I leave everything up to them, who they get to do their maintenance (obviously it would be preferable for me to do it because I already know their code inside out), who they get to host it (if they don't already have a host then I tell them to go with the one who I am a reseller for, although I leave out the reseller part), and I also leave it up to them to be responsible for domain/hosting renewal after everything is up and running, unless they tell me that they want me to look after it for them and just send them an invoice whenever I need to renew their accounts - most of my clients are more likely to take care of it on their own.