Going to Start Hosting business. Tips - Tricks and Advice

Hello

I'm going to start shared web hosting business (bluehost 100gb space - 2000 gb transfer).

welcome you to give some tips,trick, advice to run this business (i'm not noob but still learing. Knowledge is wealth)

What to do / What not to do ? etc etc

Please Share your experience and knowledge

Thanks

 

Be prepared to spend a decent amount of money and not see any profit for a while. The hosting business is HIGHLY saturated at the moment, so finding clientele is very difficult unless you are prepared to make the investment to do so. You must be able to offer your clients round-the-clock support. If you are not knowledgeable in all aspects of hosting, DNS, email, cPanel and WHM, you will find yourself in serious trouble. Bluehost offers support, but to you... not your clients. If a client's site goes down, how long will it take for you to see the ticket, research the issue, and respond? Would you find that amount of time acceptable for your site to be down? Do you know the proper questions to ask your client when troubleshooting an issue? Can you deduce whether the issue is with your configuration, or Bluehost? There are soooo many things that can go wrong!! It's a heavy responsibility being a hostmaster (or close to it), and time consuming. The more clients, the more time consuming. I would suggest doing as much research, and learn as much, as you can before taking this on. Most people have no idea what's in store. Good luck in whatever you do though!!

 

Nice reseller hosting opportunities you can get at Glowhost.com, decent US web host.
The price is competitive, so you don't need to pay much for such stable hosting service.

 

whats your domain, is it brandable?
How do you plan on marketing your services, what is your niche etc?

 

What would be the unique characteristic you would say will most differ you from other hosts? Because that would be your selling point and that will determine where your marketing efforts should go. Do you have enough knowledgeable people to help you resolve issues of various kinds? Because as mentioned, the only thing left you would otherwise have is the BlueHost, which will serve you. And I don't believe it will serve you particularly well for that matter, as it is EIG owned and most of us are well aware how "high quality" their support is.

The other thing mentioned is that you have to be patient. Alongside your patience you have to have enough capital to invest for at least an year without expecting any returns. Hosting business is heavily driven on starter promotions, so retaining your customers and building their loyalty would be detrimental for them staying with you and paying you more. Smart on-site optimization and heavy off-site efforts in building and establishing your brand would be a must.

Just a few off the top of my head...

 

As others have mentioned, you will need to have some sort of edge over other providers. It is such a cut-throat industry these days, you need to be able to provide something that other hosts can't, especially the big names. Why? Because most big name hosts will be able to offer cheaper hosting than you can.

Another tip is to make sure you can finance your company for at least 10 months from launch, because it's unlikely you'll begin to make a whole lot of money (if any), within that first 6-10 months.

I hope it all goes well for you.

 

First thing you want to figure out how to provide 24/7 support, and 24/7 support means a human should be there on desk waiting to answer customers questions, not just a help desk ticket. And if there is a human, he/she must have brain and will not answer just by reading a script or offer stock answers.

What should be important to your customers is the stability of the servers, the availability support, fair pricing and the professionalism of you and your team.

And when you decide the prices for hosting plans, remember undercutting is not the best approach to run hosting business.

 

My advice is to represent yourself with service and support, rather than features or deals. Be committed to growing at a reasonable rate (probably slowly), and stick it out for the long term.

 

I would suggest you for advertising and SEO them more advertise you do the more client you will get and also do SEO.

 

Curious if the OP took these suggestions to heart. One area where Resellers can have big success is making sure they are catering to a niche market.

 

Give free hosting to web masters, when they become popular with high traffic, ask them to upgrade to paid web hosting.

 

Look for a unique, yet catchy business brand name. Formulate a strategic marketing plan to promote your offer and services. Know your niche and your USPs better. Most web development companies are offering hosting solutions these days. Think how can you be differ from them. Offer something free as an added value service. Besides hosting service, if you add more value (SEO, online marketing advice, content support for webpages, etc.) and stick to a local audience (to start with) then you will be able to make a reasonable profit from your web hosting business. Good luck!

 

You will get some good advice on what is involved as a
hosting reseller here -
http://www.findahostingcompany.com/hosting-reseller

 

First of all if you want to start a web hosting company, you want to get it out of your head that web hosting is going to make you rich. Because its not. Web hosting is going to make you poor as hell and you are going work twice as much for very little reward. Its going to be emotionally draining and it will consume your time to nothing. Web hosting is a saturated market and the only way you are going to survive is if you have some sort of niche.

Now if you work hard and are good to your clients then it can be a rewarding business. Trust me I have been doing this for over 5 years and I am now just breaking even. If you are starting a web hosting business like your self, then I would recommend going small and growing from there. If I were you then I would go with a reseller plan. The reason why I choose reseller over vps or dedicated is you need to concentrate on building your business and not so much on configing servers, and trying to manage everything. You need to build a brand and earn trust from your clients. If you are serious about starting this business and want to do it right, then head over to webhostingtalk and learn as much as you can.

 

Best advice is learn to scale up and down when needed, keep costs as low as you can and grow when new clients come. Stupidest thing I have seen is someone with almost no customers decide to have multiple servers, in multiple locations and countries, and offer windows, and linux -> the costs were just insane and killed his business - the kid couldnt even sell it. You should start in a niche in a specific location, be in windows or linux, expand once you have some sort of client base. If you start on a reseller, you dont have to move all clients later, just add a new vps and set whmcs to add all new clients to this server. Choose VPS from providers that are happy for you to upgrade / downgrade your plans.

Keep good backups, doesnt matter if you have a vps or just a reseller account, always keep backups. If you are not going to take backups seriously, and have no plan for handling / restoring backups if or when needed, then do everyone a favour and give up.

Paypal disputes happen, even if you provide a 100% perfect service, you can expect people to file disputes just to get their money back, so the way I deal with this is just to provide instant refund, not worth the hassle. WHMCS does have maxmind module which should help reduce fraud, but also look over the details of users, if it looks suss, contact them, and if you are still concerned, refuse their business and provide them with a refund. Better to refund then be hit with a chargeback.

I have bid on (and purchased) many failed hosting companies, and from my experience, in the first 3 years, you would be lucky to earn $0 per hour (as most make a loss). Think about something, why are you choosing "your" provider (be it the reseller account, vps, server, or even collocation provider), list the reasons you are choosing them, then consider why someone else would consider you over your own provider..... Can you provide better service? Better uptime? truth is, if you do the same thing as your provider, then you are doomed. You need to offer something different.

Wanna know something? The best way to earn money is not from providing shared hosting, but in providing reseller accounts, I tell you, there is a sucker born ever minute! And for most part, you earn more then from normal hosting accounts and they use less resources (because most never get any clients)