How do I start a web hosting company?

June 24th, 2005, 12:19 pm

If you're still at the stage where you're asking how to get into it, you don't know enough to get into it, basically, yeah, don't rush into it.

Best way to break into any business is to go and work for a company for a couple of years that's already doing it.

Learn what works and what doesn't. Learn from their successes and their failures so that you don't end up making the costly mistakes yourself.

There's probably not many classes on running a hosting company, but a good place to start would be to setup a Linux box at home. If you're on broadband, put a site on it.

Try to keep the box secure, up and running, and quick. Try to hack it from another machine on your LAN to try and keep it secure.

That's about the cheapest way to learn how to do it without making too many costly mistakes. Because if you go out and lease servers, or colocate boxes, and all your clients' sensitive data (credit card details, customer databases, etc), fall into the hands of somebody malicious, you're the one responsible, and that gets REAL expensive in court.

July 8th, 2005, 2:04 pm

get the think of an expert and be shure of what u du man thats more important as for hosting there are too many hosting companys you have to had an strategy to survuve if not ure down

July 30th, 2005, 7:54 am

thanks for all the great infos.

right now i am thinking of buying a reseller plan for 300$ the year. All the features are great, and unlimited mostly.

Its a reseller plan, which i am so tempted to buy (eventho it might have no use at all)...

it has 12,000MB - 100Gig bandW.

I might add my own pages to it, but... do i really need it? I dont know, and getting into the host business is a pain. the competition is too big.

But besides of goign into business with that, i am so addicted to looking at host plans!!!! i always look at those host plans and buy useless domains. I need help! What can i do? I love looking at hosting plans. Maybe its a sign that i would like to be in that business...

July 30th, 2005, 10:52 am

Well I dont think you can become rich with a hosting site, because the most people dont want to pay for it. They scan for ftp pubs and tag it and put their site on it. And there are a lot of good free hosting sites (a lot of space no banners etc etc)

July 30th, 2005, 10:54 am

Most professionals DO know that they should pay for it. Companies do not want to be on some free random hosting space Mr.X.

They want support, reliability, and somebody accountable if their site goes down.

July 30th, 2005, 9:24 pm

The goal of any true professional is not to get rich anyway. If you want to get rich quick, invest in lotto tickets, and good luck.

A true professional will start a business because that is what they are driven to do. The business will often become that person's "baby", and if properly tended can become VERY successful in the hosting field.

A recent example would be RackShack, now EV1 Servers. I was with these guys when they only had a handful of customers, and Robert Marsh tended to it and grew it into one of the larger, more successful Internet hosting companies out there.

If you focus on quality service and awesome tech support, you can actually get pretty far in the industry without having to drop your prices to razor thin profit margins. Trust me, serious businesses know that sometimes the extra few dollars is greatly worth it for quality.

Just bear in mind not everyone counts fame and fortune as success. Many just like to see thier "baby" survive and grow into a mature entity (which can be years down the road). The money is just a perk.

But no, you're not going to make much by hosting personal sites. This is why the personal site market is saturated with crap service and advert-laden sites. It's just not profitable.

July 31st, 2005, 12:08 pm

It takes a lot of work.

I personally put in about 16 hour days to get our company growing. Never ever think that you will be an overnight success. It takes going out to conferences, meeting people in your geographic market, gaining their trust, and above all NEVER letting them down.

When you make a promise to them, match or EXCEED their expectations.
Go the exta mile when trying to get someones hosting business.

August 4th, 2006, 6:01 am

Hi

As it's little difficult business technically for a newb, I would suggest to outsource the technical support for it. The cPanel Servers are easy to troubleshoot and admin comparitively others. If you go for any cPanel server then it will be easy to start selling the hosting plans to the customers. You just need to manage your site that will let client know about your web hosting plans and also need to manage the billing/sales area for those too. It's easy to do so.
I'm a RHCT ie. RedHat Certified Technician having Advanced Intermidiate knowledge of webhosting technical support. I'm working with a web hosting technical support provding company since last 2 1/2 yrs.
I'm very familiar with web hosting technical issues and able to manage the cPanel servers very efficiently.
For more details, I would suggest to contact me at cpserveradmin@gmail.com and I'll be happy to provide you more info on web hosting business/technical support.


Thank you .. !