Web hosting for web designers — Whose name is on the client's registration when the project ends

There are two ways a studio ends up holding a client's domain, and neither of them starts badly. Either the client had no registrar account and it was quicker to do it in yours, or the site was a rebuild and the old name simply moved into your bulk account along with everything else.

Years later the same two facts become the problem. The registration stands in your name, the notification email is yours, and the client — who has always believed the domain was theirs — asks a new agency to take it over.

The whole of this page is about avoiding that conversation: how to structure a client registration, what to keep for yourself, what a clean handover looks like, and where the DNS work sits in a project rather than at the end of it.

Reseller and VPS accounts can run nameservers under your own brand — ns1.yourstudio.com and ns2.yourstudio.com — so a client checking where their site points sees your studio rather than a supplier. The mechanism is a pair of glue records registered at the registrar for your own domain, which publish the addresses of those hostnames so a resolver can find them without a circular lookup.

For a single website it is decoration. For a studio carrying a dozen client sites it does real work: you can move the underlying platform without asking twelve clients to change delegation, because the nameserver names stay the same and only what they resolve to changes. Set them up once, use them on every new build, and the next platform migration is your problem alone rather than everybody's.

A clean exit is a document, and writing it takes twenty minutes. It lists the registrar and the account the name sits in, the registrant and contact details on record, every DNS record with a note on what each one is for, where mail is handled, which vendor owns which subdomain, and the expiry date with the auto-renew state.

Give that to the client at the end of every project, not at the end of the relationship. Studios that do this get referred by clients who leave; studios that hold the code hostage get one difficult email and a review they cannot answer. When a transfer is requested, lift the lock, supply the authorisation code, and be aware that a name registered or transferred within the last sixty days cannot move until the registry hold lapses — say so up front rather than letting it look like obstruction.

What it costs to carry client accounts. Hosting several client sites is a different commercial shape from hosting your own. Reseller accounts give you WHM and cPanel, private nameservers and your own branding, so what a client sees is your studio rather than a supplier, and each account is walled off from the others.

The billing shape matters as much as the features. It is a flat base plus $0.40 per active client account per month, which means an account sitting dormant between projects costs you nothing and a client who leaves stops costing you the day they go. Price your care plans against that figure rather than against a guess, and the margin is visible from the first client rather than at the end of the year.