I worked for a small / local web development company whose owner retired about 2 years ago. The previous business offered hosting services (which, set up years ago was done in a shared hosting environment) which I just carried on (I pay the host company for the shared hosting account and then I bill the clients yearly via Quickbook/invoices).
Along the way there have been several issues with this set up and I'm considering either going to a reseller account (where clients have their own cPanels and billing via WHM) OR getting out of hosting all together.
One of my issues is most of my clients are... not really computer literate. They would easily sign their domain names over to DOA or similar hinky practices. Many of them liked the 'small town, small business' approach my previous employer had (which did work 10+ years ago...but... things and times change).
Another issue along with this are website owner's who don't (for various reasons) keep their website scripts up to date and a website gets compromised (violated, hacked). It seems the consensus is that it must be 'my fault' since I am the hosting provider. Currently my / the actual hosting company doesn't feel the same way (which leaves me holding the blame).
A third issue is that when I bill a client for their domain renewal or their hosting renewal they seem to be of the mindset that they can pay ME late and I won't disrupt their service. If I do, they get very agitated. They don't seem to understand that GoDaddy and the like will cut their service for non-payment up front too.
And my fourth issue, I really don't DESIRE to learn every detail about email and web servers (my last place of employment had a dedicated ColdFusion server and it was just... a life and soul sucking experience). I want to spend my brain power being a better website developer.
So I'm trying to restructure what I do so that I can try to avoid the above mentioned drama, and more time actually doing web development work.
One of my 'shared' hosting accounts expires in January (with the ability to renew monthly while I sort this out).
In comes the reseller hosting packages. I was specifically thinking of either InMotion or HostGator (I'm already with them now).
Part of me would love to be out of the hosting game, so that things like a hack (or misuse of WordPress) or general hosting service issues comes about I can charge for my time spent inquiring about the problem (just as if you take your computer into the computer shop). Part of me wants to stay in because I am making about $3K a year on hosting, and for the most part it hasn't been bad (with the exception of a reason hack to one WP site that took down the others on the account - which I would assume would not be as easy in a reseller account where everyone has their own cPanel).
I'd love to hear some first hand experience with them. :)