hey! I just want your opinion on the hosting solutions exists. i want to offer hosting (reseller and then dedicated in the future) and i wounding if it's not 2 late to enter this market, and should i buy a hosting website and if yes what is the estimated amount to pay for it?
It's never too late to enter this market, as long as you can market it well. I would honestly rather start fresh than to pick up someone else's business mistakes / reputation, unless they are trusted. I've run into some problems like that in the past, not with hosting company but a few other business deals. The issue with hosting companies, is there are so many available, and alot market their services with Adwords / etc. If you can compete with that, I'm sure either way you will find success.
hey thank you very much! this is all about budget for advertisment... any other suggestions? do you think it will be better to enter to it with a partner that can handle programming or request already made or personaly made website for X price?
the programming aside, I would look to see if you have the budget to provide stable and quality hardware. If you can provide very good uptime. These two factors cost. layeredtech.com will give you decent server (dual Xeon or a Intel 6600 2GB/4GB) for under U$200 with raid 1 on a 160/250GB Raid. Rackspace will give you the same machine with a guaranteed uptime for U$600. Diffrence there is the support time and hardware replacement time. ALso look at how much you know about servers. WIll you run yourself or will you have an admin. If you want basic Linux server with cpanel/whm, buy a server and get someone like platinumservermanagement.com to manage the cpanel/server for about U$30 p/m. Lastly customer tickets. If you can stay awake 24/7 ... you sorted. Otherwise get a part time admin or outsource. Prices for outsourcing for a dedicated server for ticket and phone support start at about U$100/U$150. so basically if you do everything yourself, you'll start at about U$300p/m ... if you get it all done you looking about U$1000 p/m with Perfect reliability. Now comes advertising and selling of plans. Do you oversell or not, do you run promotion, etc. Take a look at www.webhostingtalk.com and see what a jungle it is with the guys competing. On the other hand don't get dishartened. If you have the money for at least a year of total business support or at least partial support, you may get to run a very profitable business. As fatr as partner ... unless it's your parents or a sibling you trust VERY much .. I'd say no ... there are too many stories of people getting screwed by their business partners. If you are desperate maybe take a personal loan, but I wouldn't gamble with borrowed money. That's just me though
I agree completely. I would setup a new one and offer very good packages and advertise it alot rather then purchase one which reputation has been damaged. However, most hosting sites i've seen for sale are either small and could be popular if expanded as they are offering competative packages as well as the fact they seem trusted since i was interested in purchasing one a while ago (i did check out one) so in that case i would purchase one as long as its repuation wasnt damaged. Summary: if you buy and existing one make sure its repuation isnt poor.
Hey, Thank you for the replay, I would say that my hosting knowledge is limited, i want to build a good hosting and build it slowly. here is some questions: 1. My partner which owns a hosting company said that i should grab reseller hosting first becasue dedicated hosting is hard to do, and i would need to install servers and support them, what do you think? i assume if i can't do that job i should hire: platinumservermanagement.com ? 2. if i have a server with 250GB, how do i calculate that for the users? i mean how the space and speed is calculated? i do i build plans? 3. i forgot what is RAID. 4. I can stay awake but only 10 hours let's say, what is outsourcing? and are this prices per month? 5. should i collect the cash in advance for the total year, or should i pay each month? this is kinda the cash insurance that i wont stuck with no cash to support the servers. 6. how hard it is to offer reseller? i mean after i buy the servers i can logg in to them and split memory etc...? i'm so noob at this sorry...
1. Reseller hosting is a lot cheaper and because you rely fully on the webhost on all technical stuff, you can concentrate on building a customer base and growing the business. Once you have a critical mass, you can move to a dedicated server when you have the money and expertise to do so. As much as it is good to rely on a 3rd party for technical work, you still need to know something just in case the 3rd party fails you. Remember that the 3rd party management company would be supporting some hundreds of other customers and not just you. 2. If you have 250gb harddisk, deduct about 10 to 20gb for the Operating System and server applications. The rest can be used for client contents. As to how many clients, you will need to know how many people you can handle at one time. The less client per machine would mean lower load and the lower risk of facing problems. And if the server goes down, only a smaller portion of the customers are affected. You have to consider adding a backup drive and an external backup solution to ensure that if things goes wrong, you can recover. The biggest failure I see is that some web host do not have backups and when a crash occurs, their own business is ruin. 3) RAID is Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices or something like that. Basically, it is a harddisk system where you have multiple harddisks which mirrors in real time each other so when the main harddisk fails, the backup takes over and thus give you almost zero downtime. 4) Outsourcing is getting a 3rd party or your friend to take care of your customers when you are not able to do so. Prices varies if you hire them for a few hours and share that support with other businesses or you hire a full time staff. 5) It is best not to collect cash in advance for the whole year especially when you are new. On the point of view of your customer, it is risky because they do not know your reputation and if you are going to be around for the year. Do the monthly payment option until they are comfortable then if they want they can opt for the annual payment. If you need to depend on this cash for the start to support your servers then you might want to reconsider your plans. Maybe saving a little more money would be better. I would think that as a start, you should at least have 8 to 12 months worth of funds to pay for all expenses including promotion because it may take that long to become profitable. When you are in business, you should not need to worry how you going to pay for next month's bills. 6) Resellers are a different beast. If you are new to it, do not support it. Never go into any business when you are a noob because you would be easily wounded and crashed by your competitions and your customers. Remember that your customers may put their livelihood in your hands because that is what their website is to them. Fail them and you will not only crush your own dreams, you may have ruin people's businesses and thus family.
Hey, Thank you for replying! First, how hard is it to trasnfer the resellers to dedicated servers? if i have a user with resellers and he is hosted on godaddys servers, and i move to dedicated, what do i do? i just move on and offer the dedicated servers? and wait until the other users 'year' will expire? second, if i offer 5GB/account space, and i have 230 GB free, so i just 230/5 ? so i can handle 46 users/month total? is it low amount? if i just started and i have collected 46 users, should i expand the hard drive? Third, which external backup's exists? if i take a resell, it will have back up solution i guess. Fourth, I think i will offer support by myself and let's say support wait time is aprox 12 hours? i think it's fair. Fifth, which good/reliable resellers exists? i think if i take a reseller plan i can start right a way, if i wanted dedicated then i will have to wait couple of month to gather the cash. and yes, building users list is a great thing to do with resellers i guess. Any other suggestions?
1) Well, it depends on what control panel you use. If you opt for Cpanel/WHM control panel then there is a function which allows you to move sites from one server to another as long as you know the passwords. With a reseller account, you could move site by site over then reassociate with the reseller account when you move it to your site. Not impossible but not a one-step process. 2) 46 customers well I supposed you can handle that. It all depends on how much support those customers require. 3) If you have a reseller account, your backup options may be limited. Check with your web host has backup services. 4) It depends. What is important is that you provide support to your customers during their business hours.
ok, thanks! i assume if i will take reseller all i need to focus is support the clients, i dont need to pay external company to support the servers. Can some one suggest me reliable reseller company? i know go daddy has one, can you suggest it?
How huge the investment should be? I think skills can be learned over time. What other opportunities other then Hosting solutions do i have? what markets are valuable today and have a decent profit?
Although skills can be learnt over time but once you start in the web hosting business, you will need the skills before you start the business. If your customer encounters a problem, you cannot tell them that you have not learn a solution yet and check back with you a few months later. If you do that, you will lose your customers. As for investment, on the lowest end, I would say you would need at least $1000 at start up if you intend to use a reseller's account and start off small. Part of the cost would be involved in advertising for without which, no one would know that you do web hosting. Also that it may take a while to get your first customers and turn a profit so that funds should give you some nice backup funds until that happens. But to do it nicely, you may need something like upwards of $20,000 as start up money. Web hosting is a saturated business and the profit margin can be low. People have a lot of choices and you need to be better than the current big players in the industry. This means that you need to provide a better service than your competitors. You need to know what you are doing and be able to help your customers as and when they need help. This is not something where you can 'learn on the job' or assume nothing would go wrong. Remember that people's livelihood may be in your hands and how you handle your business can make and break them.
Running a web hosting business is easy to run if you have the skill's but remember, a single problem in your server could lead to more than 100's of support ticket's in a an hour. been there done that