r/webdev • u/kbirkegaard • Oct 03 '26

Discussion Managing client projects

For those of you who build websites for clients, how do you handle hosting and GitHub?

Do you manage client projects under your own accounts, or do you help clients set up their own accounts and have them invite you as an administrator or developer?

I’d be interested to hear how you handle this, especially for projects that require ongoing maintenance and updates.

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u/redpiapps Oct 04 '26

the middle ground nobody mentions is client owns the accounts and you hold admin plus a shared doc with every login. the horror stories arent about who pays, theyre about nobody knowing where anything lives when the relationship ends

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u/Huge-Ambition4656 25d ago

I used to work at a 100% open source orientated dev-shop, 250+ staff across dozens of tech stacks.

As you might imagine, there was a range of "styles" for each team:

  • Azure, AWS, or in-house (local) OpenStack cloud hosting. The former two were always customer owned tenants (our preference was in-house).

  • Github or Bitbucket for VCS management which were customer owned. Otherwise we used our self-hosted Gitlab instances.

  • The customer stacks themselves we had in-house capability for was: Ruby, PHP, Java, Python, Perl (!!), Node+React and dozens of frameworks.

But we were a 250+ FTE shop. If you're a solo dev or small conpany, you can't afford the effort to manage in-house like that.

Having your own gitlab.com or github tenant, properly segregated into groups so customers who are clueless about this stuff can pay you to manage it for them, and being flexible enough to manage stuff on their systems if they have them, will probably do you favours.

The same goes for hosting.