Info for starting a web hosting company

I'm looking to graduate college in a semester or two and I'm thinking about starting my own web hosting company. The company would perform other services in which I am more familiar with as well.

I am an MIS major at my university, but my college hasn't taught me much about web hosting or even that much networking for that matter. I searched this site for some info. on web hosting but I didn't learn much. Anyway, my question is does anyone know any good sites on starting a web hosting company or any good books for beginners as well. I haven't even begun to venture into this yet,...just on a quest for knowledge.

Hi,

I recently started a webhosting company myself and it has been doing very well. If you have any specific questions or need assistance getting started up feel free to ask me and I can walk you through the process. You can contact me at ozzu or on aim: codboy02 or codmanatwork or via e-mail: jason-c@comcast.net

codman, one suggestion about your hosting company. I can easily tell it is most likely a reseller hosting. You may want to change your nameservers so it isn't traceable that way. You will prob get more customers as well.

It sounds like you're mostly inquiring about the technical aspect of running a hosting company. The best way to delve into this is to setup an old computer with linux and install common programs required for webhosting: apache, php, mysql, proftpd, exim, etc. You can start with small reseller account to get a feel for different hosting control panels - knowing the control panel you will be offering is important so that you can offer support to your cusomters. Also, consider getting a job (for a couple years maybe) at an existing company as a technician so you can pick up some knowledge on systems administration and networking.

If you do decide to jump right in and start a company, don't neglect the business aspect either. Your State department of revenue and secretary of state will have information (probably even a website) about tax responsibilities, forming different kinds of businesses (e.g. sole proprietorship, joint venture, corporation) and other administrative details (oops, I assumed you're in the U.S. - if you're not, I'm afraid I can't help you with the business aspect). As a businessman, don't feel as though you have to cover every aspect of your business. Hire a systems administrator to keep the servers running, patch security hole, etc, and you will have a whole lot less on your plate to begin with!

Hope this helps a bit.

Personally, I would reccomend starting with a reseller account, so that you don't need to bother right away with your own server.

So what exactly is involved in reselling? It's good for beginners?
How is it different than just outright hosting?

reseller is good for beginners coz beginners dont know much abt servers and maintenance.
less risk too.
if you are one beginner, best to stick with a reseller first. learn more and decide later if u wana do otherwise.

resellers sell the web hosting space offered by big companies with servers maintained.

for resellers, make sure you do not oversell yr space and learn how/where to get clients
and of cuz, profit making too...

hosting is a hard business and it requires a lot of time and effort.

there are hosts that offer unlimited webspace/bandwidth - this does not exist and causes a lot of problems for webhosts who do not oversell and generally con their customers.

i used to work for a hosting company who used to 'oversell' their webspace and bandwidth and eventually this company went bankrupt; losing all of its customers.... Now I am in co-partner of a hosting company that is reliable and moderately successful.

the biggest step that you could take is submit your website to as many hosting directories as possible - and learn a lot of things about SEO.

tophosts.com is currently the biggest hosting directory by a long shot, however you should aim for hundreds of directories (which takes a very long time) preferably with a higher PR (pagerank.net).

webhostingtalk.com is a great forum however the forum is well reputed for being discriminative againgst younger webhosts.

a few major factors that clients look for:
- customer support
- site uptime
- reliability

yeah, it definetely is best to start off as a reseller so that you can learn the structure of the webhosting business (trial and error). once you have enough clients you will be able to buy a couple of dedicated servers and from that point you are pretty much a success.

if you become a reseller i can also recommend starting off with a monthly hosting account because if you all of a sudden lose the enthusiasm earlier on due to no clients etc. - atleast you havent just paid for an entire year of hosting. also paying for a monthly plan allows you to analyze the reliability of a webhost amongst other things.

basically: webhosting is one of the hardest business to start.

where would be a good place to go to get started in reselling? who offers the best plans?

OneStopServer.com is pretty good; that's the one I use... I'm not sure if he's still taking customers though...

if you are interesting in reselling; the most important thing to you would be to be sure that the webhost has high uptime... the last thing that you would want is selling a few accounts then all of a sudden having hours, even days of uptime and then having to explain this to your clients.

its hard to determine which hosts have high uptime or not.
Here are the http uptime stats for http://www.phpservers.com from a 3rd party: http://www.siteuptime.com/statistics.ph ... serId=9445

your best bet is to look for an uptime guarantee, and just incase a client asks a question that you dont know the answer to; great customer service.

good luck.

I, too have started a web hosting venture only a few weeks ago. I used to offer all kinds of services like web design, but the problem with that is the customers get far too picky with what they want. Even when you meet or exceed their requirements, they're far from being happy. Web hosting seemed like a better choice, because I'm great with support, I have an above-average knowledge of the technical aspect, and customers get exactly the same thing, there's no custom work needed. So far we've had quite a few orders, but not many by any means. In fact, it's been more than I got through web designing in the past year. For now we're reselling packages from a company we've used before that has excellent support. Hopefully with some advertising, we'll get a lot more orders coming in. I'm still learning though, so any information would be appreciated. Good luck to anyone else who is thinking about starting up.

The sad thing is the major players in the hosting business are paying $60-$100 per paying referal - meaning they are destroying all hopes of smaller hosting companys

I suggest you start out with reseller hosting, then go on to managed hosting, then rent your own dedicated server. I have known hosts with problems with onestopserver. i recommend ev1.

earlier in the post someone had talked about changing the DNS's to make it more personal. Could someone direct me in how to accomplish this