How we deal with hosting and infrastructure issues.
We approach these issues along the same lines that we approach server-side engineering, but even more so: if it’s mission critical, the resources responsible for it should be internal.
No third parties.
The corollary to this, of course, is that if we aren’t hosting a site, we need someone at the client that (i) understands the whole project and (ii) can accept our deliverables. What frequently happens in smaller companies is that a client wants us to deliver something to a third party. This rarely works well for two reasons. First, no one internal at the client has solid understanding of what is happening. Second, if something does go wrong, there’s just a lot of finger-pointing.
So, if we’re building a site and the client isn’t managing hosting directly, we will host. If the site is mission critical or transaction-based, the client will either have to get someone internal, or we will work with one of our partners.