User's own accounts

I design various websites for different people. At the moment, they are all on my web space. Is there any way that they can have part of my web space and pay by credit card themselves through my account? I want to do it say that they can manage things themselves if necessary

You'd have to ask the billing people.

What I'd try would be to use PayPal here, and set up my PayPal to add a subscription service to my customers. They'd pay my PayPal account, which would begin to carry a balance, and when DreamHost bills my PayPal account, it'd pull from the balance paid by my customers.

Once that's set up (or whenever you want), you can give them privileges to manage their own space.
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Account_Privileges

-Scott

In reply to:

---

Is there any way that they can have part of my web space and pay by credit card themselves through my account? I want to do it say that they can manage things themselves if necessary

---

What exactly do you mean by "so they can manage things by themselves if necessary"?

One solution would for your customers to each have their own separate account here at DH, but this would require them to sign up for their own hosting account at $119.40 a year. They could then have you do their webmastering for them either through your own username under their account or by giving you their username/password.

Now, the thing is that you could always do this for them if you ever were to exit the business and don't need to do it now. I'm not sure how to be handle it for the contingency that you got run over by a bus, though.

Or are you just thinking of the scenario where you go on vacation?

What are 50DISK50, 3DOM50, and 1IP1DOM50?
They're Dreamhost coupons!

All the people that I have done websites for all mingled together on my web space. I haven't charged on any hosting fees, just work for the website. What worries me is if something happens to me, let's say I die or become ill, they will be completely stuffed as I very much doubt they will be given permission to enter my account. But the problem is, I'm not a reseller and don't want to go down that route. As it stands, the only way I can see is if I pay the $119 a year which hosts everybody's website. I hope you can understand where I'm coming from now

I can see two possible strategies:
=== 1. Fully separate accounts now ===
What I said originally - set up separate accounts for each of you customers and have them pay for them themselves. Have each give you access to either their account or a user under their account to author and maintain their website.

=== 2. Contingency Plans ===
Make contingency plans for your clients in the case of your abrupt demise. Definitely have them own their own domains - you can ask DH support whether you can have them have their own accounts for domain registration but still host all the domains under your account here. If that's not possible, have them own the domains at some other registrar and just host the domains here.

Next, make sure they have backups of everything. The easiest way of doing that is probably to set up each of your clients as separate users under your own account. That way, you can just give them the username and password for their account and have the take the backups and do transfers themselves.

Alternatively, you could make sure that each of them has a place where you could send backups of their sites to them.

I'm sure the other kind folks here will have even better solutions!

What are 50DISK50, 3DOM50, and 1IP1DOM50?
They're Dreamhost coupons!

Let your clients know where passwords related to them are stored in case you're not around to access accounts. Your home probably isn't the best place but that's one good place of perhaps two. A trusted colleague? Relative who doesn't know anything about software? This is why some software companies have an escrow policy - especially lone developers that have source that companies will need if the proverbial bus comes around.