It’s really up to you and the client – to work out these kinds of details.
That said, if you are not going have ongoing responsibility for the site, probably best to have the client set up and pay for the hosting. He/she can then give you the access info – for the site and server.
Can you recommend a good hosting site? Is there a difference between shared hosting and hosting?
If I was to pay for the hosting (so to be able to get going quicker) can I later switch things over to the client?
See:
https://wordpress.org/hosting/
Forum policy doesn’t allow discussions of hosting, sorry – just gets too spammy. There are many hosts out there – so do some research and find one that works for you and your client. You should both know that WordPress requires ongoing maintenance, so you may want to take that into consideration when looking for hosting. Some hosts provide a higher level of support (“managed hosting”) – for an additional cost.
As to switching things to your client, probably possible, but again, talk to specific hosting companies.
I’ve been in this situation before too. In principle there are two approaches here:
1.) You pick the hosting provider and pay for it, keep the contract and charge your client ongoingly. The benefit for your client is that he has a single point of contact (i.e. you) and a single bill to pay, no matter which subsidiaries you decide to go with.
2.) You recommend a hosting provider to the client, who in turn signs up. He pays the hosting bills and gives you access to the hosting control panel. You charge for your services, and from then onwards it’s the client’s responsibility to maintain the site. The benefit is that the client has full access to the control panel and can do anything they want with it in the future.
Both approaches have their advantages, and it depends on how technically minded your client is: if they are happy for you to be the future point of contact for all web related needs, go with option 1. If they are happy to apply updates themselves, go with option 2.
There is technically no difference between “hosting” and “shared hosting”, both just mean that a remote server will take care of serving content. Specifically, “shared hosting” means that one server hosts multiple websites – it’s the most common form of budget hosting. There are other forms of hosting in which one VPS or dedicated server only hosts a single site, or hosting where multiple servers host a single site and perhaps auto scale with demands.
