5 Hosting Details to Settle Before You Hand Over a Client Project

Introduction

Launch day feels like the finish line, and then a few months later the client emails to ask who holds the hosting account, why the invoice looks different this year, or whether you can quickly check why the site slowed down. None of it takes long on its own, but it arrives when your team is deep in the next project, and it keeps a finished job open far longer than anyone budgeted for.

Most of these questions can be answered before the project closes. Here are five hosting details worth settling at handover, ideally written down somewhere the client can find them.

1. Who Owns the Hosting Account

Decide up front whether the account sits under your agency or under the client, and say so in the handover document. When the account is in your name, you carry the billing relationship and the responsibility for the site, which suits a retainer. When it is in the client's name, you need to agree on how you get access when something needs fixing. Either answer works, but they need to be written down.

2. Who Pays, and How Often

Hosting costs that sit inside your own bill get forgotten, and a client who finds a new line item a year later tends to have questions. Agree on who pays, what the monthly or yearly amount is, and how you pass the cost on if you do.

3. Where the Backups Live and Who Can Restore Them

A backup only helps when someone knows where it is and how to bring it back. Note where backups are stored, how often they run, and which person on your team or the client's team can start a restore. A restore you have tried once on a quiet afternoon goes a lot more smoothly than the first attempt during an outage.

4. Who Keeps the Software Up to Date

Every site needs security updates and framework upgrades over its lifetime, and the handover is the moment to say who handles them. If the client expects you to, that belongs in a maintenance agreement with hours attached. If the client has an in-house developer, a short note on how the site is built and deployed saves that person a lot of guesswork.

5. What Happens When Something Breaks

Give the client one clear contact and a realistic response time. Clients forgive an outage far more easily when they know who to call and roughly when to expect an answer, and your team gets to plan its week around support instead of being surprised by it.

Where Hosting Fits In

Each of these five details gets easier when the platform underneath is simple to explain. With Divio, you get predictable pricing you can pass on to clients, and you get human support from people who understand agency work, so the answer to "what happens when something breaks" has a real person behind it. Your clients' procurement teams can also download Divio's ISO certificate from our certification page, and our GDPR policy and data-processor role are documented for the clients who ask.

El Patio Studio moved to Divio and saved around 110 hours a month while cutting infrastructure costs by 20 percent, which you can read in the El Patio Studio case study. Fewer hours on hosting questions means more hours on the next client project.

If you would like to see how this fits your own handover process, you can try Divio free for 30 days.