Starting a webhosting company
This guide is here for all those people that are starting a webhosting company but have absolutly no clue how to do it or just how much work it would take to run one. If you are thinking it is still the late 90’s and the internet means quick and easy money just close this window now and stop reading…that internet is long gone. The truth of the matter is that there are thousands of webhosting “companies” many of whom are run from the desk of a 13 year old kid, while he is not at school of course. Of course I am not trying to say that all hosts are kiddie hosts, but many are and they are the ones that are willing to sell you a $5/year hosting plan. You have to realize that there are different levels of companies and service, if you try to get in to get the bottom feeder clients that want to pay as litlte as possible you will most likely run into trouble. In this article I will go over some of the things to consider before even trying to run a business.
First, do not expect to make money for the first few months. There are very few businesses that turn a profit within the first few years. Luckily with a webhosting company the overhead is pretty low, but there is still a fair amount. To start off with there are two things to consider, do you want to do your own management or do you want to start at a reseller. If you do not know what ssh is or have no clue how to do stuff like upgrading a kernel (or asking what a kernel is!) then you should NOT be doing this yourself. If that describes you then you should look at starting off with a reseller, I personally prefer cPanel, or if you have the money renting a low end dedicated server at a trustworthy provider and then hiring somebody (like my company totalserversolutions ) to run the server for you. The advantage of a management company is they will take care of all the intial setup and security leaving you to creating your website and getting clients.
When you are starting off be smart about it and figure out how much the server is going to cost as well as any additional services, such as server management or a control panel will run. Depending on the company you choose is going to make a big difference in the price. If you are going to start with a dedicated server I would suggest taking a look at a host like www.ev1servers.net where you can get a decent server for $100-150/month. If you go much below the $100/month price barrier be very warry of what you are getting. You will quickly find out that clients will not praise you for good service but if you have 30 minutes of downtime you will sure hear from them fast! A good datacenter can go a long ways towards helping you keep your server online in terms of network avaiablilty, hardware support, and just general hardware quality. Getting back to my original point, make sure that you can eat the cost of everything for a few months with very little income from your company.
Another huge consideration is advertisement. I have not done webhosting in awhile so I am not up on the best methods but one of the best things is to find a niche that you can fit into and exploit it. One very popular thing is to go out to local businesses and try to sell them on a new website along with hosting, this is especially useful if you can do design for a reasonable price. If you do not think you can find any market or way to advertise then perhaps you should sit back a few months and figure that out before you start spending money on a server, unless you are rich and just want to waste money or something.
If you are going to be doing webhosting as a legitimate company, like everybody should, you should consult a tax lawyer and get some sort of protection in the form of an LLC or incorporation just to shield yourself from the company. It will cost you a couple hundred dollars in most states but if you are looking at doing this in the long term it is the best way to do it.
If anybody has any ideas please feel free to post them below and I can go ahead and add on to this article. I will probably read over it in a few days and see if there is anything else I can tack on to it. For now it should give you a general idea of things to look about.