We understand that a lot of agencies want to provide a full service for their clients. However, when it comes to a third-party, such as hosting, that you are using within your service, it can come with its own demands.
And those demands can be quite straightforward for your clients with steady traffic and website maintenance. But for those with year on year growth it can start to be more demanding for your team to manage.
The trigger points from the agency side
We always feel that there are certain ‘trigger’ points within an agency that indicate it is time to change the hosting relationship. These might be:
- Time. How much time is it taking you to manage the hosting for your client? If it is taking you more time than development then it is worth looking at the current hosting/client relationship.
- Being the messenger. As an extension of the above, you might be the ‘person in the middle’ and passing requests from your client straight to the host. Some hosts, such as ourselves, have a variety of permission levels so that your client can access the support desk directly without access to all admin areas. But if you’re the middle-person it might also be time to look at a different hosting arrangement.
- Scale, security and server configuration. If your client is growing or an existing enterprise-level client they might need more in terms of scale of resources, security levels and server configuration than you have expertise in-house. Again, a good hosting provider, like ourselves, will supply this but you may end up feeling stuck in the middle!
The trigger point from the client side
The client tends to be a larger organisation than the agency. And depending on their size they may have in-house IT support as well as their own marketing and digital team. Depending on their product or service they may have shareholders or accreditation levels that they need to reach. These obligations might include increases in security needed from hosting and increased access to their hosting provider is needed.
That strategic flexibility tends to be the key trigger point we see from the client side. A growing or enterprise size client can need to move at pace. Allowing them to implement changes and updates quickly and cost-effectively while retaining full ownership and control of their data.
There are times when we see the trigger point as dissatisfaction with an agency. This can be the case with hosts that have a longer response time than others. Our recent survey highlighted that 38% of respondents had to wait over four hours for a response. A significant business delay for the agency to then pass to their clients. Our aim as a hosting provider is to work as an extension of an agency’s in-house time, our response time is under five minutes as outlined within our Service Level Agreement. This enables us to fully support agencies to ensure that dissatisfaction is not one of the trigger points to change the agency/client/host relationship.
How to transfer hosting to your client effectively
The first step, if you have a hint of trigger points from either side, is to open a conversation around hosting. As an agency, this enables you to maintain a positive relationship with your client and add value during a transfer process.
If the discussions highlight that your client has outgrown the hosting package then it is an opportunity to recommend other providers. This can be a collaborative process to understand the specification they need alongside service level.
Lastly, providing assistance around migration, if needed, can ease the process for your client. This might be through providing access via the current hosting provider or supplying back-ups and required files. A good hosting provider can make the migration pain-free, we can work with or without access to another provider but access enables us to migrate and trial the site before any potential DNS changes. This gives your client peace of mind that everything is securely in place before a change-over happens.
We’re here to put a human face to hosting. If you need support to understand any trigger points in your current hosting, you can find support at the end of our live-chat or via our support desk and we’ll talk through any queries you have.