Taking Over a Website
What to ask for when you inherit a client site, and what to do when the previous agency goes quiet.
Read the handover guide
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Web Hosting for Digital Marketing Agencies
The moment you host a client's website, you have taken on an obligation that outlives the contract. Web hosting for digital marketing agencies is rarely a decision anybody made. It happens because somebody needed a place to put a site on a Tuesday, and five years later you are still the only person who can log in.
The day a client leaves
Here is how it usually goes. A client gives notice, politely, and asks for their website. You go to hand it over and find it sitting on one shared plan alongside eleven other clients, in a single control panel, with one login and one billing card. There is no clean way to give them just theirs.
So you improvise. You export what you can, you zip up a folder, you email a database dump, and you spend two unbilled days on an account that is already closed. Meanwhile the client's new agency is asking questions you cannot answer quickly, and every hour of delay reads as obstruction rather than what it is, which is a filing problem.
The hosting itself was never the hard part. Putting a small brochure site on a server is close to free and takes minutes. The hard part is that hosting is a relationship with a term, a renewal, a password and an owner, and agencies tend to create those faster than they document them.
A useful test: pick a client at random and ask yourself how long it would take, today, to hand them everything they own with no help from you. If the answer is more than an afternoon, that is the thing to fix.
One plan per client, named so you can read it
If your client sites are stacked in one control panel, we will set each one on its own account with the client's own details, so the next handover takes an afternoon instead of two unbilled days.
What web hosting for digital marketing agencies commits you to
Plenty of agencies mark up hosting and bill it monthly. That is a legitimate line of business and it can be a good one. It is worth being clear-eyed about what you have sold, though, because the invoice is small and the duty attached to it is not.
When you host, you have quietly agreed to four things: that the site stays up, that it gets patched, that somebody restores it if it breaks, and that you are reachable when it does. None of those appear in a typical scope of work. All of them get invoked at nine on a Sunday evening.
The three ways agencies do this
| Arrangement | What it looks like | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Everything on one agency plan | All client sites in a single control panel you own | You cannot hand over one site cleanly, and one compromised site can affect the neighbours |
| One account per client, agency pays | Separate plan per client, billed to your card, marked up | Tidy to hand over, but you are carrying the renewals and the card is yours |
| Client owns the account, you have access | The client is the account holder, you hold a login | Nothing to untangle later, but you have less control and a client can lock you out mid-project |
The middle and bottom rows are both defensible. The top row is the one that causes the trouble in the story above, and it is also the most common, because it is what happens when nobody makes a decision.
If you do want the recurring revenue, the version that ages well is one plan per client, in a naming scheme you can read at a glance, with the client's own details on the account. Shared hosting is almost always the right product for the sites agencies build. Ordinary business sites, landing pages and small WordPress installs do not need anything exotic. Check current pricing before you set your markup, and set it knowing you have sold support along with the server.
Offboarding, and being able to let go cleanly
Clients leave. It is not a failure, it is a normal event, and the agencies that handle it well get referrals from the ones that left. The whole thing turns on whether you can produce a clean, complete handover without a scramble.
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Inventory what the client actually owns
The domain, the hosting account, the website files and database, the email, the DNS records, and any third-party accounts opened in your name on their behalf. Write it down once per client at the start, not at the end.
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Put the domain in the client's name now
Not on exit. This is the single item that turns a two-hour handover into a two-week standoff, and it is free to get right on day one.
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Keep a current export, not a promise of one
A tested copy of files and database, taken recently. If your only backup is the host's own, confirm you can actually restore from it before you need to. See website backups for what a usable backup looks like.
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Hand over, then remove yourself
Transfer or grant ownership, confirm the client can log in without you, then take your own access off the account. Leaving an admin login behind on a site you no longer maintain is a liability, not a courtesy.
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Document the DNS
Where the domain points, and what the mail records are. A handover that breaks email is the one people remember. The DNS management page covers the records that matter.
If you are on the receiving end of one of these, going in rather than out, the same list works in reverse. Taking over a website walks through what to ask for from an outgoing agency and what to do when nobody will tell you where the site is hosted.
Whose name the domain is in decides everything later
Of everything an agency holds for a client, the domain is the one that carries real weight. It is the client's address, their email, and often the single most valuable digital thing they own. It should be registered to them.
Agencies end up holding domains for understandable reasons. The client did not have a card handy, or you bought it before the contract, or it was easier to keep everything on one registrar account. None of those reasons survives the day the relationship sours.
- Register in the client's legal business name, with a client email address as the contact.
- Give yourself technical access rather than ownership. You can manage records without holding the asset.
- Turn on auto-renew and watch the expiry dates anyway. A lapsed domain is the fastest way to take a client offline, and recovering an expired domain gets expensive quickly.
- If you already hold client domains, move them now rather than at exit. A domain transfer is routine when both sides are cooperating and miserable when they are not.
- Keep the registrar contact email off a mailbox that dies when a staff member leaves.
There is a version of this where an agency holds the domain as leverage. It works exactly once, and it is worth more in reputational damage than any unpaid invoice it recovers.
We have untangled the eleven-clients-one-panel account
Send us how your client sites and domains sit today. We will move the ones that would be painful to hand over, keep the email working through it, and tell you plainly if yours is already fine.
Your own website is a work sample
This one is uncomfortable and it is fair. Prospects check the agency's own site, and a marketing agency with a slow, dated, half-broken website has a credibility problem that no case study fixes. The cobbler's children thing is a joke everywhere except here, where the shoes are the product.
The good news is that the fix is rarely a hosting upgrade. Agency sites are slow for the same reasons everyone's site is slow: unresized hero images, a stack of tracking scripts loading before anything renders, a theme carrying features you never used, and a homepage video nobody watches.
Things worth checking on your own site this week
- How many tracking and pixel scripts load on first paint, and whether every one of them is still in use.
- Whether the certificate is valid on every hostname you use, including the ones you forgot. Details on the SSL page.
- Whether the case studies still point at live client sites, or at ones that have since been rebuilt by somebody else.
- Whether your WordPress install and plugins are current, which is the same discipline you sell. WordPress security covers what actually gets sites defaced.
None of that needs a bigger plan. It needs an afternoon, which is the hardest thing in an agency to find, because it is unbillable.
Who should not be doing any of this
If you buy media and never touch a website, none of the obligations on this page apply to you. Run paid social, run search, build the creative, report on it, and let the client's own site stay with whoever built it. You will be better at your job and you will not spend Sunday nights restoring a database.
It is worth saying that plainly because hosting gets pitched to agencies as an easy recurring revenue line. The revenue is real. So is the support load, and the support load does not scale with the invoice. A client paying a small monthly hosting fee will still expect you to answer when the site goes down, and they are not wrong to.
- If you do not want to be reachable out of hours, do not host.
- If nobody at the agency can restore a site from a backup, do not host until somebody can.
- If you host three sites and are considering a reseller product to manage them, three is not enough to justify the overhead. Separate plans are simpler.
- If a client is on a platform where the vendor hosts the site, leave it there. Adding yourself to that chain helps nobody. The hosting versus website builder page covers where that line sits.
Where hosting genuinely does belong in an agency: you build sites, you maintain them under a retainer that says so, and you would be logging in anyway. At that point holding the hosting removes friction rather than adding risk, provided each client sits on their own account.
How AldoMedia helps
AldoMedia has been building and maintaining websites in Buffalo since 1999, which means we have been the incoming agency and the outgoing one, and we have untangled plenty of accounts where eleven clients shared a control panel. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and we will tell you when the arrangement you already have is fine.
If you are moving a batch of client sites, the order of operations that keeps email working through the change is on the website migration page. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us how your client sites are set up now.
Common questions
Agency hosting questions
Should my agency host client websites at all?
Only if you would be logging in anyway. If you build and maintain sites under a retainer, holding the hosting removes friction. If you buy media and never touch the website, it adds an out-of-hours obligation you are not being paid for. The deciding question is not whether the markup is attractive. It is whether somebody at your agency will answer the phone when a client site goes down on a Sunday.
Can I put all my client sites on one hosting plan?
You can, and it is the arrangement that causes the most pain later. When a client leaves you have no clean way to hand over just their site, and one neglected install can create problems for the neighbours in the same account. One plan per client, named so you can read the list at a glance, costs a little more and saves days.
Who should the client's domain be registered to?
The client, in their legal business name, with a client email address as the registrant contact. Give yourself technical access so you can manage records without holding the asset. If you are currently holding client domains in your own account, move them while everyone is on good terms. A transfer is routine when both sides cooperate and painful when they do not.
A client is leaving. What do I actually have to hand over?
The domain, the hosting account or a complete export of files and database, the DNS and mail records, the email accounts, and any third-party services opened on their behalf. Confirm they can log in without you, then remove your own access. Keeping an admin account on a site you no longer maintain is a liability rather than a favour.
Do I need a reseller product to manage client hosting?
Not at a small number of sites. Under roughly a dozen, separate plans are simpler to run and far simpler to hand over. Reseller products earn their keep when you are managing enough accounts that per-account billing and provisioning become the bottleneck. Buying one to manage three sites adds a layer between you and the thing you are trying to fix.
We inherited a client site and nobody knows where it is hosted. Where do we start?
Start with the domain. Look up who it is registered with and where its DNS points, because that tells you which server is answering for the website and which for the mail. From there you can identify the host and work out who holds the account. Our page on taking over a website walks through the rest, including what to do when the previous agency will not respond.
Related
Website Migration
Moving client sites to a new host without taking their email down in the process.
How a migration worksDNS Management
The records that decide where a client's website and mail actually go, in plain terms.
Read about DNSEvery trade we cover is listed on hosting by industry.
Hero image: Shixart1985, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
Sort the client accounts out before the next one leaves
Tell us how your client sites and domains are set up now and we will tell you which ones would be a problem to hand over. If the arrangement is already clean, we will say so.
Get Your Web Hosting Plan Get help choosing
Or call 716-771-2536 and tell us what the site has to do. If the plan you are already on is the right one, we will say so.