Freelancer Portfolio Hosting on a Domain of Your Own

Your email address works harder than your portfolio

Freelancers usually build the portfolio first and leave email for later, which tends to be backwards. A potential client sees your email address before your work: on the proposal, on the invoice and in your first reply. An address on your own domain gives a different impression from a free one.

This is not about seeming corporate. An address such as [email protected] shows a client that you have been at this long enough to set it up, that you can be reached at an address that will still exist next year, and that your business is kept apart from your private life. A quote sent from Gmail is judged on price. Send the same quote from your own domain and it is judged on credibility.

There are practical gains as well. The address stays yours if you switch email provider, you can add hello@ or accounts@ later without announcing a new address, and you can give a collaborator a project address without opening up your personal inbox.

Putting your clients' sites on your account too

When you build websites for others, the number of sites a plan permits matters more than how much storage it has. Each client takes a slot, so moving from one plan to the next usually comes down to how many clients you have, not disk space.

Settle two things early on. Give each client a separate domain and a separate database, even on your shared account, so that handing a site over later is a tidy job and not an untangling exercise. And agree from the outset whose name the domain is registered in. Putting a client's domain in your own name is easy at the time, and turns into an awkward conversation on the day they decide to leave.

Once you are charging clients for hosting and want it under your own brand and nameservers, you need reseller hosting rather than a bigger shared plan. Get in touch about it when that time comes.

Questions from Freelancers