used to treat deployment stuff as a launch week problem. i'd build the whole thing on a staging url, get the final sign-off, and then ask the client for their domain registrar or cloudflare login so we could go live.
almost every single time, that turned into a two week delay.
either the client had no idea where the domain was bought, or some old agency from three years ago still held the dns account, or their production stripe account wasn't even verified yet. meanwhile my final invoice is sitting there unpaid because the project isn't technically live, even though my code has been done for days.
when i put together velloxis, i ended up shoving the dns, hosting, and integration access step right into day one of onboarding, next to the brand colors and copy.
i don't even touch their server on week one. the whole point is forcing them to hunt down those logins while i'm still building, so if they need to recover an account or message their old dev, that clock runs during development instead of blocking launch day.
do you guys ask for production access and dns upfront, or wait until staging is approved?
