How To Start A Web Hosting Company [Help]

[Chocolinx]

From the basics, to make a decent webhosting company you need computers with lots of HDD space right? And a good router to handle decent amounts of load. I got the local hardware pretty down pat.

Although my big question is, what kind of internet connection will I need to help serve my customers better? I've notice home connections like ADSL are just out of the question, their uploads seem rediculously slow, or just not well controlled. I've heard that sDSL or T1 would be an optimal solution, although where would I start to look for such services? And what kind of pricing am I looking at?

[jyeung]

Okay, I own one, so here we go:

Forget about doing it with an ADSL/T1/whatever you get at your home or office. Firstly, your home or office does not have the redundancy required to run a good operation. Nor does it have the bandwidth capacity. ADSL isn't going to cut it - you need connections from tier 1 providers (Verio, Level3, etc.).

Now, getting one of these connections won't be cheap. Cogent's the cheapest at $1000/month for 100Mbps, but even then you need connectivity from various providers for redundancy.

Add to that your costs for backup power, air conditioning, etc. and it just makes your web hosting proposition a very expensive one indeed.

A much better way would be to get a dedicated server from a datacentre which has all this stuff in place. Basically, you'll just be owning a server (or renting one), and you don't have to worry about connectivity, etc. You can then sell the disc space and bandwidth off to your own clients and go from there.

- Jason

[Bskll]

lol jason, where you've been all this time? lurking on rfd?

[Justin C]

Yep, Jason has it right. Don't bother trying to host websites out of your home. Just start with a reseller or VPS account and work up from there.

I personally use VPS's from www.liquidweb.com

[siriuskao]

business plan?

how about support? system administration?.....

most importantly, there are so many fly-by-night or basement web host out there, why are you special?

[BartBandy]

I got the local hardware pretty down pat.

Sorry, but you really don't have a clue about anything related to webhosting. Don't bother.

[Coolme]

The webhosting arena is more competitve than ever, so you have to stand out by lowering your TCO. (Toal Cost of Operation) Brandwidth for example, are services that will eat a lot of your budget because upload bandwidth usually costs a lot per GB, unless you buy in bulk or you find a way to make it work.... http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/8028/imgp0362sizedjl5.jpg

400 clients max, 1.0 TB per month (though residental high speed internet usually have softcaps)

[macuser]

From the basics, to make a decent webhosting company you need computers with lots of HDD space right? And a good router to handle decent amounts of load. I got the local hardware pretty down pat.Router?!

*faints*

If you say "router" and mean those small little boxes with wall warts, a WAN port and four LAN ports and maybe wireless, then... don't even bother.

I tried downgrading from a dedicated pfsense box to a WRT54Gv5 w/ DD-WRT micro v24 RC3. I'm in a living hell right now, and pretty much all I'm doing is hosting some virtual machines for myself/friends on my PowerEdge 860 and torrenting.

[mmmken]

Don't.

Webhosting isn't worth the time nor effort anymore - unless you're loaded with cash (and even then, you're looking at a high risk of failure). It's ridiculously easy to start up a webhosting company now - where a thirteen year old could do so in a matter of five minutes or so with daddy's credit card.

I used to make an awesome living off of webhosting when I was in high school - affording me all of the newest gadgets, and lived like a king (since it was all disposable income, and I had no idea of "saving" concept). Back then, it was already crowded..

[teknoluv]

From the basics, to make a decent webhosting company you need computers with lots of HDD space right?
The short answer is no.

[wheel]

The short answer is no.
+1

Hardware in web hosting isnt' the issue. Just call myles at www.prioritycolo.com and he'll host your server in a monster (connectivity/uptime wise) data center. Throw on cpanel or something like that and you're good for your first couple hundred customers.

No, the problem you'll have is getting that couple of hundred customers. AND supporting them. Who's going to look after server security when some idiot installs an open script and you get rooted? Who's going to monitor it when once of your customers sends out spam (and you get to eat the results). The letters from the lawyers demanding you take down one of your client's sites because they've infringed copyright. Speaking of which, how are you going to handle the nightmare that is client email these days. Who's monitoring the server at 3:00am on a Sunday night when one of your clients runs a task that sucks all your resources and takes you offline.

I actually do some very limited webhosting in a very small niche market. I have a tightly defined set of rules on what I allow and don't (i.e. absolutely NO file uploads) that you won't get away with - and still the hosting side of things is a pita.

And talk about low cost. People will be complaining about paying $10 a month - see plenty of threads around here on the subject......the first requirement out of everyone's mouth is 'cheap'. Not that they'll put up with anything less than top tier support and uptime for the low cost though.

And how are you going to find customers? The search engines? Web hosting is one of the most competitive terms online; I would be reluctant to enter into it. Any other way and you're going to be paying big bucks to advertise and be in a very competitive environment.

Heck, take the name I dropped at the top of my post. How are you going to compete? Low cost, great connectivity, superb uptime, great peering connections, the guy knows his stuff cold, support is awesome. And he's got an entire cage.

No, entering into a hyper competitive, established market like that isn't a smart move IMO.

If you want to do something like that, find a niche. Something where nobody's doing much. For example, maybe something like a commercial nameserver provider. Get a nice system put together, get colo's in a half dozen datacenters (you can get that for like $100 a month) and start promoting that. A nice control panel for clients to manage their dns, given them their own 'named' nameservers and maybe you'll do some business. There's a million things out there like that, but general webhosting, ewwww.

[deep]

Best way for you to start a webhosting company = resell.