How do you usually deal with hosting for your customers?

Hi all,

I would love to hear about people who are self-employed.

At the moment I have 2 types of clients, clients who have their own web hosting and clients who want me to take care of absolutely everything for them, but at the same time, when their hosting goes wrong, they are the first ones to shout at me on the phone.

Liability wise, how do you deal with people who are hosted on your own web server please? I have an entire backup service with a retention of 7 days(of all my client's accounts), but let's say the customer has been hacked 8 days ago, and do not notice the database issue until the day 8th. I obviously cannot reload anything before that, who should be to blame? Me or the client?

How would you protect yourself against this kind of issue?

I see a lot of contracts of web designers on the internet but nothing really mention this kind of issue.

Thanks in advance for your advice with your own experience in web design/programming as self-employed

ftiersch

5 years ago

Level 28

I only host a couple of friends that usually don't have very important data on my server. But i also shelled out for a backup system that comes with the hosting (acronis backup) that backs the whole server up regularly and automatically keeps backups e.g. a weekly backup from last month and a monthly backup from the last 6 months etc.

Also I do have insurance against IT mistakes (though that is mostly for my work with clients on their servers because that could get expensive very quickly if I make a mistake).

The rest comes down to the contracts you have with your clients I'd say. Give them the responsibility and liability you're willing to take on, otherwise you can just help them find a provider that's fitting for their needs and offer a consulting fee for maintenance etc.

User1980

5 years ago

Level 4

Thank you so much for the feedback. I will have to look for an insurance and see the cost on this(just in case). Regarding the backups, I already have something in place but 6 months ago, the backup service I was using failed at my hosting provider premise and have lost a lot of data for of a customer of mine. I paid extra to get this full server backup in place but it failed...nightmare. I always trusted my hosting backups but realised that if with this.....I still need to be very careful. So I started to do Drive backups of individual accounts but found out that this can fail too.

So yes perhaps insurance might be the right way ahead.

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