How many web hosts here offer website design or graphics etc on your hosting site? Do any of you hire out people to do the main graphics and site designs or are your customers solely responsible for their own?

We do a lot of internal design mainly locally rather than on the global market place as for us it allows for our clients to approach us with ideas and the face to face aspect of communication is really what allows us to get a feel for a business, their aims, goals and their staff to allow us to put it across in their website.

Rather than read an email and go from that, though we do utilise emails to keep clients informed and also for quick questions, updates or previews. Though I’m of the opinion that the two industries are still essentially two different businesses though adding value to your packages is always an advantage though many hosts I’ve seen do this thus far seem to work from a template when creating their designs or link into a number of public template sites.

Though ultimately having support staff with a great interest in all areas of website development and creation does allow you to offer great help to your hosting clients be it by coding suggestions or coding with them as well as answering support tickets revolving around website development.

That sounds like a really great thing you have going on there. I am sure it is much more simple to find out what someone would like done, by physically being there to describe it.

We started as a design company and moved into hosting over the years. While we have staff that do both web and graphic work themselves, our focus of the busienss is web hosting (it's a full time job keeping servers online and working). We have partnered with many design firms and recommend those to customers instead.

Even our own site was done by one of the web designers that we recommend as it was cheaper than paying internal staff to do it

We do both - some internal and some external. We don't offer design services online, but do offer them via direct mail to a target niche.

We are first a design firm then a hosting company. We were getting requests for web development so I figured we should host them as well too

and that's a great combination.

All depends on what your main source of income is. If your bread and butter is design then offer web hosting to complement your offering to your clients - I mean, why send them to another host when you can do it just as well yourself?

I have also seen web hosts trying to offer web design as another means of attaining revenue but fail because they attempt to outsource the labor. Stick to what you know best and where you can add value.

I'm going to second RightServers input here. I think outsourcing the work can take away from your core value. I tend to believe that pitching that work over the fence to a design firm (if you don't have qualified in-house staff) is a good way to build a new partner, or channel, and more than likely they'll send business back your way.