Even as little as 3 years ago the market for web hosting was saturated beyond belief. Every 15 year old who could get a hold of their moms credit card was opening a web hosting site. It seems to have evened out, for the most part, and I'm thinking web hosting may be viable. What are your thoughts? opinions? ect.. My only concern is that many host now offer unlimited space and/or bandwidth and this seems so unrealistic without actually owning a cluster of servers.
Totally agreed with you. But nowsday client is smart enough to not buy the hosting with unlimited feature coz the hosting it self is not sustainable. IMO,hosting industry is still lack of those company that take the needs of their client seriously.
Offer something unique, I.E, have a nice layout, great support, quick connection. Not a lot of hosts have all these assets.
Yes I agree. You need to choose hosts which have good content, reasonable prices, extensive services and very good support.
Well even companies like hostgator offers unlimited space/bandwidth with their plans. Of course if you read their TOS you'll see that you can't do A LOT of things on your account with them. For instance Proxy and Image Hosting Sites are not allowed.
You can get in the market easy enough at the moment. You do need a really good design (something I am working on at the moment!) But more importantly you need a service that is better and cheaper than anyone else, its the only way of really driving the customers in otherwise your not really going to get big quick enough. We are currently looking at powerful dedicated servers at really reasonable prices with crazy deals on bandwidth. One of the main areas people are trying to expand into at the moment is Remote Desktop hosting whcih you can see by looking in the buy and sell hosting section. Generally there is a pattern with hosting, one host will get a new product such as cheap VPS servers, get loads of sales and everyone else goes "I want some of that" so they get similar servers and sell similar products. The pricing war then starts untill the hosts finally realise they are now only making $1 per customer and thats really not worth their time to support the customers. This is the point when you notice the servers start getting slow, unrealible and basically you end up paying for what your getting. After I went a bit off topic there I am trying to say get an original idea, and a cheap price, but dont go in the pricing war! you will end up making no money or very little and just not enjoying it Another option is also buy out an already running host makes it alot less effort, although if your looking for less effort hosting business isn't for you. Best of Luck
In my opinion, web hosting is still a saturated market. There are many good general web hosting companies out there to choose from. Building yet another one is unlikely to be very successful. I imagine the big guys have already squeezed their cost structures to the point where a new startup would have a very difficult time. In such an environment, in my opinion, it is best to try and seek out a niche to satisfy. Rather than competing with HostGator or HostMonster, find a smaller group of people who have particular needs. Satisfy those needs really well and charge a premium. Much easier said than done..