I used to be an actor, but programming jobs are easier to come by. I've been doing this now for 11 years. I focus on pixels and experience, especially on iOS and the web.
I was a freelancer in my younger days and have returned to it now. When I started freelancing, I (like you) aimed to be a "one stop shop" for less tech savvy organizations. In my case, though, it was mostly artists and lawyers. I thought that I would do the hosting in addition to the design and coding of their sites and build loyal relationships and pocket a tidy margin for the hosting. However, I dropped that after about a year for a few big reasons:
I wasn't taking enough of a cut to make it worth my time. Unless you're going to be charging ongoing Squarespace-level prices, the overhead of staying on as an SRE for a client is unlikely to be worth any bonus you get to the relationship.
On top of that, I saw no bonuses to the relationships. I had hopes that it would help me close sales and help me gain repeat business from clients. The opposite happened, clients would be worried about me quitting one day and taking their site down with me. I had a much easier time selling my services when it included an account on a "reliable" hosting service that they would have the password and payment info for when we were done.
Finally, it actually wound up hurting my relationship with some clients. While a standard design & build contract had a defined "end" (when the site is accepted and goes live), hosting contracts never did. While this is, in theory, ok because your services should be limited to hosting after the initial build, my experience was that less technical clients didn't understand where the appropriate boundaries were. They failed to understand why I would jump into action if their site was down, but insist on charging them if they wanted me to make design tweaks. This wound up hurting the relationships that being a one-stop-shop was supposed to help and was what finally pushed me to stop pretending to be a hosting company.
All that being said, if you want to own being a hosting company (whereas I was more a design and build focused freelancer who was doing hosting as a "bonus feature"), you might be able to make it work. Just take my story as a caveat.
Hey there! I'm a Software Engineer with a passion for helping others, which I do via YouTube usually. Feel free to reach out with business inquiries or if you'd just like to talk shop. Happy coding!
Thank you for taking the time to respond in full. All of that really resonated with me. Being a brand new freelancer myself that has had no focus in devOps or long term site maintenance, I think I'll heed by your words and stick to just building the projects and setting defined ends.
Thanks again!
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I was a freelancer in my younger days and have returned to it now. When I started freelancing, I (like you) aimed to be a "one stop shop" for less tech savvy organizations. In my case, though, it was mostly artists and lawyers. I thought that I would do the hosting in addition to the design and coding of their sites and build loyal relationships and pocket a tidy margin for the hosting. However, I dropped that after about a year for a few big reasons:
All that being said, if you want to own being a hosting company (whereas I was more a design and build focused freelancer who was doing hosting as a "bonus feature"), you might be able to make it work. Just take my story as a caveat.
Hey Zack,
Thank you for taking the time to respond in full. All of that really resonated with me. Being a brand new freelancer myself that has had no focus in devOps or long term site maintenance, I think I'll heed by your words and stick to just building the projects and setting defined ends.
Thanks again!