How rich are web developers?

How do freelance web developers and designers run the business when they're doing websites for clients? (I've broken this question down into multiple questions that come to mind to someone wanting to learn about the business, please see the description)

• Do freelance web developers and designer host websites for clients and do domain registration? Are both under the client's name or their? If they don't want to keep running a website for a client do they give the website code to the client after the term has ended? Would the client take that code to other developers and would they be chancing or adding to the code? Or is the code kept with the original developer and any new developer a client goes to has to build the website from scratch? The kinds of websites I'm referring to would be for small businesses or personal websites for people.

• Answer:

  When I've done these kinds of sites the client has always bought the domain and web hosting already in their own names. If your clients aren't intelligent enough to do this themselves then you probably don't want to be working with them in the first place. You'd never register a clients domain name with your own details, that's the intellectual property of whoever owns the site. With hosting, some freelancers may have their own hosting setup which he/she hosts all their clients sites. Many agencies work in this way. The downside for the client however is that they're affectively tied to that agency or freelancer, (which is what many agencies/freelancers would prefer. They also get to charge a monthly/annual hosting fee which is usually a lot more than a conventional retail hosting deal) Once the site is live I'll keep a copy of the website locally, which really means I just don't delete the locally hosted dev version. The client has access to the live site so if they want to get someone else to work on it in the future they can just copy the live files and database from there if they need to. If they want the psds or other design files then I'll provide this to them. However this has never happened in my experience.