[HeyLaughingBoy]

I'm with an engineering services co and we just started getting into Web work: until now we've primarily done embedded systems and mobile apps.

How did you typically manage the server/ops end? i.e., do you turn that over to the client and say "here are all the credentials, SaaS licenses and everything you need to run this, good luck" or did you offer Operations & server management as part of your package?

It's something I'm not finding good information on from the web. Real-world insight would be helpful, if you can.

[qz2]

Been 15 years since I did this myself. Got fed up with trying to get people to pay their bills.

Trick is to keep your costs as low as possible and charge them as much as possible for the privilege. I'd probably throw it all at AWS, probably Elastic Beanstalk now and charge them whatever that is plus 30% with a minimum retainer amount. If they want it handed over, there's an exit and handover fee and an ongoing support contract that needs to be set up.

[01100011]

At my old company we handed it to the client. I don't think any of our clients would have wanted to pay our rates to maintain the servers for them.

[rovr138]

In a past job, we'd do the same.

As part of completing, there's a transfer phase. Usually we move everything to their in house/managed servers unless we built it there. In that case, we'd make sure that they disable logins and lock down our accesses.

Regarding OP's question about license and accounts, we'd usually build things with their accesses and keys. It's easier that way.

Regarding small clients, if we took them on there was probably something else in the relationship so we might have kept hosting it for them.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

> Regarding OP's question about license and accounts, we'd usually build things with their accesses and keys. It's easier that way.

Good to hear that. It's what we've done so far (transitioning from our own keys, etc. as the project gets closer to finished). It has sometimes been difficult with non-technical clients to, e.g., walk them through the process of getting their own certificates.

When we're integrating with a client who has their own engineering staff, it's pretty much a non-issue.

[krab]

In my experience, it is usually passed to the client with some training. Often, the client wants to order the servers and any saas by himself, you only specify what to order or you get an account within their cloud provider.

[aeyes]

For many years I worked at a random big corp software development company. Hosting & Ops is where the big profits rolled in, usually with sweet long term contracts.

I certainly would recommend looking into providing this service. Why would you turn down guaranteed monthly paychecks? Also, you wrote the software so you will be the most competent in operating it.