Hosting Business

Everyone tells me that getting into hosting business is a good idea. It seems like there are millions of hosting companies out there so is the market still open for new providers?

Also if you have a hosting business how do you run it? Do you just give people Cpanel access to their account on your dedicated server?

 

There is a heck of a lot more to it then that, you need to provide billing, support, and sales. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

Go over to www.webhostingtalk.com and read then read some more then keep read. It's a crowded market but if you offer a good service then you could make a name for yourself. But don't think you can just put up a website and expect people to come buy hosting from you.

 

Customers would get their own separate account (/home/user) on the server and their own cpanel with its own set of permissions. This is all set up using WebHost Manager... cpanel's server administration and reseller panel software which would be installed on a dedicated server. This costs about $25 more per month in addition to the cost of the server and now also includes Fantastico.

If your just starting, I would suggest starting with getting a reseller account and then move into a dedicated server later. Its a "dog eat dog" type of competition out there... but new hosts can still compete especially if they narrow in on (and fulfill) a particular service/ niche.

 

Yeah no reason you can't start out with a reseller account on a good shared server. You might be better promoting to local business that might not be so net savvy rather than fighting for the business that comes looking for you online. It's easier to convince a mom-n-pop to host with you for $30 / month than it is to offer that package online where people are comparing you to others...

 

What you should do is get a simple linux distro, learn the linux structure, how to use commandline...basicly as much as you possibly can. Then get to know at least apache, mysql, firewall configuration, email servers (at least). Although you can do much through cPanel/WHM it's still very limited when problems occure. Learning cPanel/WHM (or other control panel) is the easiest part.

 

You must have olso lots of money to invest ...

 

First you need to know what you are doing and second you need to have lots of money and time. A web hosting business is a 24/7/365 job.

 

You also can't run a succesful hosting business on your own. You'll have to have customer support organiced so that although you would get sick, your internet connection would go down for a week or what ever your business would still keep running.

 

Who told you getting into hosting is a good idea?

Can you give me one good reason why starting a hosting business is a good idea?

 

Don't seem a good idea for me.. maybe free hosting would be better?

Future info for free hosting: xpanel

 

I've been doing hosting for two years now + domain registration service. Trust me this is a hell of a job, support was taking my sleep time, and server crashes were turning my hair gray! I had around 1000+ customers and a little issue with the server resulted in 1000support tickets! answering them was a real pain. But profits where nice too, when I first started I was earning 400$ in the first month! Accounting profit I mean. Next month it doubled and than I had steady increase of 10% per month! MY advice, go with hostgator dedicated server, first order little one, cheapo, than go up as ur customer number increases!

 

Sounds like a nightmare..definitely not business for one man show.

 

There are much easier ways to loose your money than starting a hosting business!

 

man, the profits part really encouraging. why not outsource your support to third company? i heard India is a good place to do outsourcing.

 

I hired couple of people from webhostingtalk forum, to run support system. But it appeared I was always first to answer all the support questions. I didn't have time to implement, but I had some interesting ideas on managing support.

Yes, outsourcing to India is a good idea... but that won't come cheap. Even India is getting expensive

 

Unlike large web hosts, smaller hosts survive with giving the extra 'personal touch' feelings, clients are like friends to the host and most of the time it is not just answering support tickets with canned answers like mosts large hosts or outsource support do, but usually know a little bit more on the clients' regular activities on the account and thus able to offer a little more extra care/tips specifically tailored to the clients. Some people prefer to host with a small host or someone they know personally knowing that they will get special attentions when they need help, where it might not be able to have that kind of treatment with a large host.

 

I stepped into the hosting business when it was quite proffitable, and the market was open to new providers. However, soon after I started the business, I was feeling like I was sure I'd give it up. I still have my hosting domain (6 letter .com) but I would eventually put it on sale.

Why? Not enough time to dedicate to this considering that I'd rather spend nights developing and digging PHP rather than taking in a linux server maintenance headache and a database of angry customers once something goes wrong. And that day surely comes.. I just realised I was not the man for the hosting business.

 

The only way i did reseller hosting was to sell site design with hosting. But this will only work with people who know nothing about hosting. They have more support issues but are willing to pay more.

Lots of easier ways to make money.

 

Whoever told you that is a moron.

Hosting is an incredibly difficult business to break into and make good money at nowadays.

 

I used to host websites but I quit doing so for the following reasons:

1. You get customers who know NOTHING about the internet, so they email you 50 times per day asking how to make a text bold or something even though you state that you do not offer website design support in that manner. They think that a web host means someone will do all of their work for them for a few bucks per month.

2. They install vulnerable scripts and then when they get hacked they blame you.

3. They run backups over and over again until your server crashes. Or they install badly coded scripts that suck up 99% of the server's resources.

4. You have to oversell to compete with the competition. However there are some clients that actually use up all of what you offer. I ran out of harddrive space on my one server because of this.

5. Any time there is some minor network lag that is out of your control, they will email you 10 times any time there is slight lag. 90% of the time it is their crappy ISP that is lagging and not the server network but they blame you anyway.

6. Once I was selling big hosting packages for another company. So I had to go out and buy more servers since things were going so well. Then the network lagged for only a few hours which made about 12 clients cancel and I was stuck with the $1000 server bills and had to cancel them and lost money.

7. You will get emails from new customers saying "OMFG you charge $2 dollars per month for that? I can get 5000GB of HD and 900000GB bandwidth for $2 dollars!" However they do not realize that other site is ran by a 12 year old kid who is overselling and will not last long.

8. Free sites like Myspace are offering everything for free so it is hard to sell any service on the internet now. Even though you offer better quality service, a lot of people are idiots and rather go with crap that is free than a inexpensive good service.

9. It sucks when someone cancels their subscription, then you try to contact them for a month with no response. You finally remove their site, and when you do then they contact you asking where their site is.