When I freelanced, it was 1 to 1. I put it on the customer to sign up for hosting (often at DO), give me the credentials and I'd take it from there. As it was their account, I was not on the hook for doing billing, invoicing, making sure they renewed their services every year, etc... More importantly, if I no longer wanted to support the site, it could be handed off to another developer without me having to move the site from my servers, etc...
I'm old school - I prefer from scratch. Basic DO server, install everything from yum / CentOS x and write the code for it. Later in freelancing I starting doing sites in Wordpress because it made sense from a time / money perspective.
Personal work / side projects, I'll host as many as I can on a single server until the project gets out of the garage and needs it's own resources.