Hosting & infrastructure
In project estimates
Line-item it: hosting, domain, SSL, CDN, backups, monitoring. 'Included in price' is money you'll forget to bill.
Hosting types
Shared — brochure sites under 10k traffic. VPS — most projects. Cloud (AWS/GCP/DO) — scalable services. Managed — WordPress/specialty when there's no devops.
Typical costs
Shared $5–15/mo, VPS $20–80, mid cloud $50–300. Plus domain $10–15/yr, free SSL (Let's Encrypt), backups 10–20% of server cost.
Whose account
The client always owns the account — the agency administrates. Otherwise at parting, the client is hostage to your infra and you're their debtor.
SLA & liability
99.9% uptime ≈ 8.7h downtime/year — standard guarantee. In contract: what you cover (code, config) vs not (provider outages, DDoS).
Handover
Handover checklist: credentials in the client's password manager, deploy docs, final backup, removing your access.
About Hosting & infrastructure in estimates
Hosting & infrastructure in estimates — How to include hosting in project estimates: environments, backups, monitoring, client billing. For agencies: Agency tools. Use our tools without registration or installing software. All calculations happen in your browser — your data is never sent to a server.