Hi guys, I own a small (currently, but hopefully not for long ) web design business and am wondering on whether hosting is a good business to go in to. I offer hosting for many of my clients, but it usually is managed by us and on our small hosting account. I do not have a lot of experience with hosting so would love some advice: 1. How is the hosting market doing at the moment? 2. Is dedicated hosting worth it or should I stick to a reseller account of some sort? What are some good and cheap companies where I could buy dedicated hosting (or the reseller account)? 3. Is cPanel worth the $1500 to buy or ~$40 per month to rent? It's not much and I personally like the feel, but are there free alternatives? What do end-users (i.e., clients) think of cPanel? 4. What is the going-rate for the standard amount of hosting a small business website (i.e., clients) would need? Thanks! Love, Chris
It all depends on your location. Hosting business is pretty saturated but if you are in a small country where internet is on its first steps you might make huge profits Also , cPanel is the most preferred control panel nowdays by almost anyone so yeah , spending for it is really worth. Dedicated servers are much better than reseller account. As I said it all depends on your abilities and skills. Good Luck Olgi
Actually if you were to rent a dedicated server, most datacenter would offer cPanel as part of the package or as a cheap option. If you do not own the server then it is better to just rent the cPanel besides it is cheaper that way as rental ensure you get updates during the time frame of the rental. Purchase of the cPanel license only gives you limited update options. Although there are several control panels out there, only cPanel and Plesk stands out. cPanel is leading very far ahead of its competitors. The web hosting market is relatively saturated and the profit margin is very low now so to be successful, you need to work on volume. If you cannot dedicated 24 hours of the day 7 days a week to the business, it may not be a business you should venture. It depends on whether you are a responsible purpose or not because for the most parts, whether your customer makes or breaks in their online business would depend on your ability to support them and to keep the server up and humming 24/7. Downtime or lost of data may ruins people's life. However if you think to offer web hosting to your own design customers then it is really not a bad idea since you can control the content and the running of the sites.