Upravljanje domenima i hostingom klijenata
The client domain and hosting portfolio is the cheapest service an agency sells and the most expensive incident it can have. One expired domain costs you a whole client; forty domains kept in someone's head cost a working day a month. Below: what managing client domains and hosting actually looks like — what the register holds, how to rebill honestly, and how not to lose a domain.
Keeping the portfolio under control, in short
- Keep one single register: domain, registrar, client, expiry date, who pays.
- Put hosting and SSL certificates in the same list, with the same expiry dates.
- Set alerts 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry, addressed to a named person.
- Rebill the cost to the client with a management margin you state openly, not one you hide.
- Keep the registrar account in the client's name, with the agency as administrator.
What the register must contain
- The domain name, the registrar and the exact expiry date.
- The client who owns it and the contact who approves renewal.
- The hosting plan, the provider, the included resources and the renewal date.
- The SSL certificate: type, issuer, expiry date, automatic or manual renewal.
- Who pays: the agency, with rebilling, or the client directly, on their own card.
- The registrant's contact details, handled under GDPR (EU Regulation 2016/679) — these are personal data, not internal notes.
Table: 40 domains and 18 hosting plans
A typical small-agency portfolio: 40 .ro domains, 18 shared hosting plans and 12 wildcard certificates (the rest on free certificates, auto-renewed). For .ro, RoTLD's published annual tariff is €12 plus VAT and registrars typically retail it at €16–20 — roughly 90 lei per domain.
The 15% margin is not resale, it is payment for administration. One hour per domain per year is 40 hours, i.e. 6,000 lei at 150 lei an hour; the margin covers 2,466 lei of that. You cover the rest through automation — alerts and renewals in one place — not through a bigger margin.
Annual cost vs. rebilled, with a 15% management margin
| Line | Annual cost | Rebilled to the client |
|---|---|---|
| 40 .ro domains (90 lei/year) | 3,600 lei | 4,140 lei |
| 18 hosting plans (480 lei/year) | 8,640 lei | 9,936 lei |
| 12 wildcard SSL certificates (350 lei/year) | 4,200 lei | 4,830 lei |
| Total | 16,440 lei | 18,906 lei |
The risk of a lost domain
An expired .ro domain does not vanish immediately: it enters a window in which only the registrant can recover it, then becomes available to anyone. From that moment you no longer have a technical problem — you have a negotiation with whoever grabbed it.
The cost is not the 90-lei renewal fee. It is the site down, the email dead, the rankings gone, and a client with no reason left to trust you. One incident like that can cost a 4,000 lei/month retainer — 48,000 lei a year.
- Don't keep client domains in a personal registrar account tied to an inbox only one person reads.
- Don't rely on registrar emails: they land on an old address, or in spam.
- Check regularly that auto-renew is on and that there is a valid card behind it.
- Document, per client, who owns the account and who can authorise a transfer.
Common mistakes
- A spreadsheet owned by one person, updated whenever they remember.
- Rebilling with no margin: you administer 40 domains for free.
- Manually renewed SSL certificates, found expired by the client rather than by you.
- Domains registered in the agency's name, claimed back by the client on the way out.
- Hosting bought from five different providers: five invoices, five panels, five passwords.