web hosting responsiblity

I just got my first gig for building a website. My first question is whose responsibilty is it to oversee the webhosting acct (passwords, payments, etc) as well as the domain name registration when it is due.

Would the client get his or her own acct from dreamhost so that way they would have acces to payment options as well as passwords? Or would I be the sole "keeper" of the acct, all the passwords, all the payment info, such as credit card numbers?

any help would be greatly appreciated

I'm confused by your question.

When we, as client, get the account from dreamhost, we have access to payment options as well as passwords. We can change passwords. We can add or remove credit cards.

I hope I won't confuse you but dreamhost is the sole "keeper" of the account. We only have the access. It is similar to the bank account. Bank is the sole "keeper" and we have access to account.

Ultimately whoever owns the account is responsible for everything, for example submitting support requests when required, any copyright issues that may come up, so if you don't want the responsibility of such things, you should ask your client to register an account, if your client is not up to looking after these responsibilities and you wish to look after these things, you should be able to charge accordingly for managing their hosting on a continuing basis.

You are doing the right thing in asking here because there are a lot of people here who have done a lot of gigs like the one you're going to be doing!

I think you'll get some variation in your answers because there are a couple of reasonable ways of doing it. I suspect that the most common way of doing things is to have you do everything and to just have you pass along the cost to your client in your fee. This way you can reap the economy of scale associated with hosting multiple sites on one account here at DH. The domain registration is another degree of freedom but just remember that you can always transfer registration to the client if they dump you. Now they may request domain registration be done in their name and that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.