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Best Way to Start a Website Hosting Service?
Kwirl writes "Lets say that I wanted to start a small business endeavor, namely reselling my server space and offering pre-built websites. What resources would I need to start something like this on my own? What hosting service would best suit those needs? What would be the best way to manage a subdomain-level service that provided a basic forum, registration, a web site and some controlled administrative access for my friends so they couldn't easily terrorize each other? I'm curious to know if I could start something like this on my own, and without much more than just my own server space, time, and creativity. I'm not looking to make a living out of this, its mostly just a way for me to more efficiently manage having several friends each wanting me to built or run a web site for them, and perhaps make some small residual income if a market exists. The Slashdot community represents such a broad swath of experience and expertise that I'd like to know how you would approach a project of this nature."
1. Don't
But, if you insist..
Set up a simple box running Plesk. It automates most of the tasks of handling users, billing and maintenance. It also allows them to mange their own accounts.
Quick, simple
Try using CPanel and limit shell access. If they know what they're doing and you know you know more, then go ahead (at an additional cost, of course).
I work in web hosting and to be honest if you have to ask that question you should not even try. I would suggest reading a few books, websites and possibly take a few courses in hosting realted fields. Then when you are able to answer your own question you will be ready.
1) Line up a patsy
2) Get some matches/lighter/firestarters
3) Burn down all competing datacentres in your city
4) Set up a webserver company
Seriously though, it's an incredibly overcrowded market - if you have an idea on something new or innovative to offer, then by all means go for it. But as they say, there's nothing new under the sun, and you'd have much better luck trying to compete within a market that isn't so overcrowded. Professional encryption/sensitive data management perhaps?
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Seriously, what do you feel you offer that thousands of others don't?
A small player is going to have a hard time competing in the hosting market unless you already have a customer base you can turn to.
The average person can get hosting space very cheap, and even professionals can find decently priced plans that will cover sites with higher traffic levels. Remember, even Google is offering hosting these days!
Do you really have anything to offer customers that the others don't? If not, wait until you find a way to differentiate yourself from all the others.
Ooops, that should be FOUR steps. Damn lack of sleep.
Just buy a reseller hosting package from an existing hosting provider. Much easier and cheaper - all the hard work is done for you.
If you don't know the answers to these questions, don't get paid to know the answers. You don't want to be a knowledge worker and learning on the job. If I were you, I'd do it for the fun of doing it until you answer more questions than you ask on the forums for the technologies you're using, and swallow the costs in the meantime.
My ex boss (in a *very* small company) did this for his friends/business associates. It's a royal PITA. Unless you *can* make a living off of it (and have a good business plan that convinces you it's feasible), I would recommend not doing it.
It sounds easy at first. How hard is it to just whack up a couple of simple web pages for a couple of buddies? Lots of us have one of our own and it takes almost no maintenance.
But what happens when your buddy starts to attract some undesirable attention? For example, maybe you buddy has a car dealership and just wants a quick and dirty website. But he pisses a script kiddie who then spends the next year trying to pull down your server.
Or what happens if the site goes down at 3 am and your buddy just *has* to have it up and running?
Or what happens if your buddy decides he just *has* to send emails from his website when someone clicks on something, and you discover that the package you are using has about a million vulnerabilities and you are now the biggest spam king in the US?
Honestly, it just sucks. Buddies who can't set up their own website are almost always unreasonable. And they will expect "professional service" even if you don't charge them. And they will bug you continuously for completely boneheaded things having to do with their site.
Unless you really don't like sleeping, I recommend backing away from this idea.
I run a gridserver account at Media Temple, $20/mo or $200/yr. Set up websites with 1-click apps like Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress or any other easy to use free PHP CMS. Wordpress is easy to modify and has a very large range of plugins and templates to work from. You can set up webmail access on MT servers as well as FTP and SSH and permissions for additional user access to your main server account if need be. Many other Hosting Companies have similar systems available or more. I have over 10 webpages on my server account and am barely scratching the resources so far.
If I make one webpage for a few hundred dollars, it pays my hosting for the year. Until I use 1/2 my resources, I have no need to upgrade so far.
If you want to make a small fortune, start with a large one.
If you are just starting out, the way to go would be to get a dedicated server with hosting management software such as cPanel/WHM, preferrably from a company that will provide some management for you as well. There is also the 'reseller account' approach but for a variety of reasons I don't really recommend it (e.g. there are more potential and real problems which are outside of your control, and it becomes harder to do your support, among other things). If you aren't really prepared to make the $160-500/month investment for a decent server with some management, you might be better off pursuing a different opportunity.
Warning: You need to differentiate yourself somehow. This is a highly competitive market.
<plug type="shameless">We provide managed servers for a number of hosting companies. You worry about the billing and supporting your customers, we'll worry about your server and supporting you.</plug>
SSL Certificate
Think. Stop.
It's more annoying than you might think. I've done it, all my friends have done it, my cousin's done it and our dog will be doing it soon.
Don't don't don't. It's a VASTLY under subscribed and overly competitive market. Once you think you're the best, and you're successful, you become too reliant on a core group of customers who won't last for ever.
There are reseller accounts available with lots of ISPs, but few are on a commission basis (ie: you're the one who has to cover your client's costs and invoice them). Flat fees are usually available to dedicated servers licensors @ £50/m+ - but the market is changing and I'm not at all surprised if they're cheaper.
Plesk - possibly the worst thing I've ever used. Convoluted backend I couldn't hack on to extend pop-before-smtp the way I wanted.
CPanel - the original but very costly 6 years ago when I last used it. Has some impressive addons
EnsimDirectAdmin - Not one I've used personally, but I hear its ok.
VHCS - Freeware. Never used it personally. But there are many OS projects and forks out there if you look hard enough ]
Cubepanel and BlueQuartz worth a mention.
Most of these project offer "lite" versions which are free for restricted personal use. The only major difference between the free and paid versions is that the latter has multi-user and reseller capabilities.
I'd recommending taking up a decent Linux or BSD distro with a proven track record of security fixes. "apt-get update" is sufficient for the home user, but realistically, you want to track purely security updates. Consider an enterprise OS (CentOS?!)
Matt
Seriously. Cost pressure is immense in that field. Quality is seldomly awarded. Designing TOS is paramount, with legalese being the first and foremost thing. Security will be a nightmare, you will be under constant scanning attacks.
People are constantly complaining about how bad their hosting provider is or what features they wish their providers offer. I'd compile a list and keep it on hand as a reference of what not to do. Then create a list of the exact opposite and put that up on your homepage as "features".
I'd start with 18 2x quad-core 2.3 GHz webservers each with 8 gigs of RAM, and 4 quad-core 2.3 GHz databases with 16 gigs of RAM.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
I would use amazon's web services, if the business plan showed that I could make better than minimum wage.
:-)
Step one is write up a business plan and price out your hosting costs and try and pay yourself something even if it is a hobby.
Amazon instances have no SLA, so your backup will have to be rock solid (it was going to be anyways, right? so that's not an issue
The advantage of using Amazon is no unused inventory; scale up as you need; and about a seventy dollar a month minimum.
If Google looks like they will make it out of beta before you are going to be ready to launch you might look at it.
Work bio at MMWD
DON'T DO IT.
If you want to play with a server environment, get a mainstream linux distro and install it with all the web capabilities from the beginning. Then learn how to administrate it, install and modify php, learn apache control mechanisms, learn about chroot jails, even consider virtual servers (as in VMWare type of virtual).
Then if you're still up for it, rent a virtual solution from somebody else, and play with it a bit more. The costs to entry are very low, but there is almost no return.
Build your friends website by all means, but you're better off hosting it on a third parties hardware, and let them take the strain of running the hosting business. You still get admin access, but all the tools will already be in place.
I've been doing this for years (8+) and I get more hassle from the users than from the sites. You need a call centre just to explain to people that there is nothing wrong with the site, maybe their net connection is down. Or they're not getting their email, because their isp is blocking it, or the page doesn't look right because their browser is still caching it from last month etc etc etc.
I have someone who questioned why their site costs money each month to run. "To pay for the server" I replied. "Oh, I thought that once you had uploaded it, it was out there, on the internet" he replied. *Smacks hand to forehead*
Oh, and if they want to offer downloads, then make it clear that they will be charged for bandwidth, over and above any monthly fee. Do not give shell access out like candy, and don't allow anonymous ftp.
All in all, don't bother, unless you really are a masochist. By all means build sites for friends, but set them up with a host somewhere, and let them get on with it. 90% of people don't keep up with updates to sites anyway, and you get left with crap lying around on your server(s). I have 1 guy who bought a domain name through me around 6 years ago. He has never had a website for that domain. Every year I hit him for the renewal fees and he pays up, but it will never be a real functioning site. He is the best kind of customer. Beware of people who want stuff, especially those who think they know what they want.
Overall, realise that this is a huge subject with many many intricacies that you find as you go along. Do you really want to go down that road, or would it be much better to take the blue pill now and forget about it ?
I know somebody who started with this a few years ago. When I spoke to him he said the easy part was the technical stuff. The hard part was the administration and actualy getting the money from people.
Then there was the moment he was accepting credit cards and he ended up paying the fraud that went on.
So see that your administration and bookkeeping skills are top
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
As most have already written, this has been done and done well by many. Try 1and1.com, Google, Yahoo, your local cable companies have hosted web services. I use yourwebdepartment.com
The price of storage and bandwidth is so cheap for the big guys that it is hard to compete as a small host. I make an ok living by selling development and design service (custom premium price stuff rather than cheap pre-made) then the hosting is tacked on as an additional fee.. say an extra $50 - $100 per year.
I have used both Plesk and Cpanel, they both suck, but they also serve their purpose.
I did this for a couple of years. And the conclusions I came to were that:-
1. No money in simply hosting sites on a small scale
2. If you offer hosting, over sell your server capacity by at least a 1000% or you will never attract customers. They hardly ever use more than 1% of what they sign up for and won't sign up unless your storage/bandwidth offer is as ridiculous as everybody else.
3. Convert your hosting clients to higher value customers by offering web/graphic design opt-in email marketing services etc.
4. Either write your own services/management systems, keep your free software updated religiously or plan for the day when your free software is exploited and your server is owned by a couple of kids. When this happens your server will get null routed your customers will be angry and you will spend a couple of days at least recovering (damn OpenWebmail!)
5. Be prepared to answer support calls any time any place, no matter what crisis your life is in. Imagine troubleshooting a technical problem whilst on a stag weekend in Dublin!
If you can't do all this yourself, you need a pot of money to get a good team who can, but don't expect to make a good profit unless your added value is exceptional.
I got out of pure IT all together, I've found that it's far easier to get a traditional business off the ground and with the skills I've got my new company is light years ahead of the competition. How many small catering businesses do you know of that have 1TB File Server, there own dedicated web/mail server, asterisk PBX with VOIP/POTS lines etc, and a dedicated 24/7 tech support person with excellent dish washing skills?
How about avoiding the mess that is hosting your own server and using one of the many reseller packages that are out there.
Yes, they might be expensive and yes you might not have total control over many things but you:
1) don't have the hassle for security and uptime (if it goes down you complain to the host).
2) many reseller packages have software that automate billing and registration.
3) are usually "unlimited" so you can host many sites for your friends at little to no cost (depending on volume of sites registered.
I do it and I find it to be a pretty good way of hosting for friends and family for less than $50 a month.
Cost to you, about $15 per month.
Depending on how many friends, charge them $3 to $5 per month...
Did this for myself last year, to give myself a big web sandbox to play around in...
Money well spent...
Disclosure: No, I don't own GoDaddy, but I am a satisfied customer.
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
You've seen the best answer many time by now. Just don't do it.
"I'm not looking to make a living out of this...
While you're not looking to make a living out of this it may very well turn into a full time job that's not making a living for you. Going in without a good sysadmin at your side is definitely not a good idea. Customer support will *murder* your time over and over again. Unless you have a ton of money for advertising like 1&1 (did you see how many magazine pages they buy???) you won't have much luck getting customers.
You'll need Ubuntu Server, Drupal, Webmin and Virtualmin. All are F/OSS and usable out-of-the-box with large and friendly support communities. Good luck, have fun.
Money for nothing, pix for free
you do it local, and bring it bundled with website design and development. the web hosting field is rather overcrowded, and big companies are offering ridiculous (and unrealistic) amounts of resources to catch clients. and they succeed. dont count on adwords. adwords's roi is sucking tit since 2004. big corps are paying ridiculous bids for web hosting keywords and its impossible to compete with them. its google's bad game. in order to make more money they increased the weight of bid in ad placement and decreased weight of ad quality, clickthrough rate. result has been disaster for small businesses that have high competition in their field.
by going local you can still do good business. many people need reliable and cheap all in one bundles of web design, domain registration and hosting.
get a linux box, apache, php, mysql, get cPanel on top of it. that is the most widespread used setup. when we take on a new customer its very high chance that they already know how to use a cPanel site control panel. DONT ever think of getting plesk, it has a very shitty and confusing user interface.
Read radical news here
never ever advice anyone 1and1. i have had to bail many clients out of their hellhole.
Read radical news here
I make all my clients pay for their hosting and domains themselves. I'll generally set them up with someone good, and then drill into their heads how important it is to pay the bill on time when it comes around next year. I tried the reseller thing and it is too big a pain in the ass to track down all the money. You end up doing all the work and taking all the risk. Screw that. Leave it to the professionals and focus on site design and implementation.
+0 Meh
At least not yet. Do yourself a favor and torture yourse-- get your feet wet beforehand.
First, set up a bare-bones Linux/BSD box with only the processes you'll need. Rent a dedicated server or a VPS so you can avoid splurging on bandwidth for now.
Iptables, Apache, MySQL/Postgre, Denyhosts (Don't set that to email you. Just don't.), BIND9 and vsftpd are a good start. Chroot users and force SSL when configuring vsftpd, use mpm-itk when setting up Apache (vhosts run as a specific user and users don't have to worry about chmodding scripts). Also, you should probably install Postfix and configure it to only send mail; so many forum/blog scripts use email verification. Now tie all that together with some control panel.
Now that you're done with the technical parts (that I can remember), grab a bottle of Asprin and start advertising. Charge something small like $4/month (don't accept credit) and set up a free service with ads. The goal here is to look like a faceless organization instead of a person with the capacity to get pissed, so automate the hell out of everything and make the main site look like a big, ugly ad for itself with tons of flashy features. Just look at any $5/month host for an example.
After a few months of this, you'll either know what you're doing, or you'll be bald. Get started.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
I actually got into this almost accidentally about 5 years ago. My advice? Don't even consider it.
It is a stressful endeavor that has a tiny return. Hosting is so competitive, you'll make almost nothing from each customer. If you know people who want hosting, it is more profitable to signup for an affiliate account with an existing hosting company and refer the customer to them (a lot will pay around $100, which for me at least, was a year of profit).
Your customers will only remember who you are when there is a problem with their website, having forgotten all about you when their bills were due. Seriously, I had clients who hadn't paid their bill in years - I didn't care enough to turn their accounts off for non-payment. When I decided to get out of the business, I gave all my customers 3 month's notice and then turned off my server. I had 3 phone calls in one day from people who hadn't paid their bills in at least a year, irate that their site was down.
Seriously, if you just want to make a little money on the side, just go the affiliate route. It is a lot less work and stress, and you'll probably make about the same amount of money in the end anyway.
Everyones comments are valid if the human element is removed. In reality people don't choose a service on price alone. They also consider things like how well they like or trust the owner. In reality people will consider their local community.
/var/bind/zones/newdomain.com" >> /etc/bind/named.conf.local) and load the new config using rndc. Apache is very similar except I use a template in /etc/apache2/sites-available then use "a2ensite newdomain" to start the new site. Lastly, the script setups up the database account, creates some databases, inserts information into the postfix database to setup their email domain and administrative account.
/etc/bind/named.conf.local > named.tmp && mv named.tmp /etc/bind/named.conf.local. I can also use the built in tools like a2dissite to disable the website and simple sql queries to disable email and lastly using the built in adduser command to lock the shell account. All of this gets done with a script as well.
I had a client who was having ongoing connectivity issues with a local wisp. We tried to get them to be done with the problems (all wireless related) and switch to comcast (rock solid in our area) and they would not simply due to the current standings with the local chamber of commerce. They instead choose to stick it out for several weeks longer than any one else would have. Eventually the wisp tracked down the issue but during those weeks they dealt with a consistent 10% packet loss.
So now that everyone has been reminded of the human element can anyone provide anything more useful than "dont do it"?
My goal is to one day open a home computer shop with some kind of basic hosting for personal email or small business web and email. I spend quit a bit of time staying up to date with apache, bind, mysql, and postfix configuration. Postfix can be easily configured for use of a database back end. Apache and Bind are both dead simple to automate. You don't need anything too fancy for this kind of thing. Small businesses do not require all types of bandwidth or server power though these other posters seem to think you want to open a data center with their talks of racks full of equipment. For what I am shooting for two boxes will be plenty. I'll load balance because the option is there but the second box is just for redundancy not computing power.
I also make use of built in components where possible , such as using the skel directories when creating a user. The skel directories contain all the separate application directories with template files. Then I awk the template replacing the template token with the specifics for the new domain. Each user account is limited to scp/sftp and is chrooted. When logging in it appears to be a full filesystem but they cannot escape their home directories. In the case of the CMS's I use symlinks to point to their chrooted user configuration files. Apache and Bind each have their own template which is awked then I simply echo a line out to the main configuration file to include it (ie: echo "include
This adds the benefit of making disabling sites just as easy because then I can just grep -v "newdomain.com"
Learn the configuration of your services and then find the best way for you to automate the creation is my suggestion. Billing is simple, quickbooks is very cheap and is well suited for simple recurring bills for services, including late notices and all.
ADSL...
A couple friends and I are running three dedicated machines, one at a mass hoster, two at the local ISP round the corner. We're all working in the industry, so in general, everbody knows what they're doing. Everybody has root (via sudo) and all important config files are in a CVS repository with commit mails, so everone knows when someone changes something. We all want the control over the main services we use (email, web pages, some VPN stuff), and this way, we can all save a bit of money by sharing the costs for the necessary infrastructure.
The important bit here is: we all trust each other to keep things running and not make grave mistakes.
On the other hand, I have helped friends with technical things they felt they couln't handle themselves, and quite a number of times, they demanded a level of service that would have cost hundreds, if not thousands a year commercially, but didn't want to spend that money. Instead those "friends" assumed I would provide that service for free, since "you do that anyway, and it's really easy for you". Don't fall into that trap.
Go ahead. Otherwise you might want to consider chartered accountancy or, perhaps, lion taming!
Invenio via vel creo
I am not going to tell you any details about how I've done it or with whom, etc.
I will say I am 75 years old, never took a course in any computer program, use Frontpage (oh the humanity! - but it does the job) most of the time, Photoshop, a good text editor (I like Alleycode) plus some Joomla, WordPress and a very good little shopping cart. I seek out and intently use various forums. I have one modest sized dedicated managed server based at a resource that gives great tech support, and another shared server account (likewise). I charge $240 per year prepaid (refund of unused portion anytime) and reasonable prices for site building.
I have clients in 7 countries. I'm not getting rich but it sure beats Social Security. I have a very satisfying retention rate; some clients are with me now for more than ten years.
How do I do this in the face of all the negatives, real and imagined above?
I give very serious personal service. My home phone is on my business cards.
I regularly study and monitor every client's web sites (some have as many as five sites) very carefully and am proactive in alerting them to issues that affect performance and value. I watch their traffic and the email flow and take action when I see a problem.
I deal only with the owner of the business or the top executive of the organization (I have a number of NGOs, some of them famous).
I avoid making presentations to potential clients whom I recognize early on as people who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. You can tell who they are because they only want to know the price, not discuss what their needs are or how my services will fulfill them. Let the discounters have them.
Based on years of experience, I never accept creative people of any kind as clients. That means, no writers, painters, performers, photographers, etc. - they are unteachable and surprisingly close-minded. Give me an inquiring, curious and engaqed business person any day.
When I screw up, I make sincere amends that build trust and loyalty. For example, when I failed to prevent an unintended domain expiration, I worked hard at recovery, got back the name for my client and gave him a free year of registration and hosting. He's been with me now for 6 years.
I never speak with anyone without giving them a business card. During a visit to any store or business or any casual encounter, I hand out a card. I give a free year of hosting to any existing client who sends me a new client.
In other words, bottom line, I work at getting customers and I work even harder at keeping them.
Does that explain Steve Ballmer?
I know RTFQ is forbidden over here, but the OP doesn't want to make a living out of this. 95% of the comments below easily ignore that and tell the OP not to even consider starting something like this up... where is the geek-curiosity of just wanting to figure out how hosting works? Sure, he might get fed up with it in a year, but at least he learned something in the process.
Anyway, I'd start by installing your favorite distro on your server, installing ISPConfig and going from there. cPanel and the like are doable for commercial hosters, but ISPConfig seems good enough for the project you are describing. Play around with it, learn how it works under the bonnet and throw up a small forum for communications.
If you are looking into making a larger business out of this, go for quality and not quantity. Like the rest of these comments state, you don't want to answer to hundreds of people when your servers go down while you are on a holiday. Go for a few more-complex projects, and offer your own hosting as an extra. Personally I'm doing the same (with hosted redundant dedicated servers, I was done playing hosting-provider years ago) but only for a few customers with large projects running on them. And remember that the interesting part is in building those projects, not supporting them.
This sig is intentionally left blank
Got it!
Make the support # 1-900!
If they don't bother to pay but then they call to whine, you get your money back. It gets charged to their phone bill, and they probably don't look at that either.
If they can handle themselves silently, they "stay cheap".
If they call knowing it's a charged call but they're screwed and need help, then it's an even-handed deal.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I started off doing website design and development for local small businesses. When a couple of them got tired of dealing with their hosting companies, I set up a reseller account over at Hostgator, and offered the hosting as well.
I started a service called "Hands Off Hosting". My customers contract with me to design, develop and host their sites, and if they have any issues, I am the only person they have to deal with. I make small changes for them gratis, and I make a hefty profit on the hosting.
IOW - don't bother trying to do it yourself. As everyone here has pointed out, the market is saturated. Admin, security and support are all going to become huge time sinks, and you can't compete on price or features with the big dogs. Find out what you can do to differentiate yourself and let someone else handle the dirty details.
you'll need to have more on the table than a vanilla set of services and performance. it's quite a saturated market. i don't think i'd waste my time. i don't even host my own stuff anymore since google started offering free hosting. https://www.google.com/a/
I agree with the "don't". We did it in 1994, 1995 and 1996. It was a royal PITA. The solution was to let other people run the PITA part and do the web design ourselves.
:-)
1. If there is a server problem at 2am, it was someone else's problem.
2. If there is a connection problem, ditto.
3. The margins were terrible and are much worse now.
If you are doing it for your friends and they are content without 24/7 tech support, willing to work on your schedule, etc then by all means do it, but if you are looking to do it for people you don't know, unless you have a lot of time and a lot of $ (to hire people etc) to invest in starting it, don't do it.
You could lease a server at a place like serverbeach. Costs are low and bandwidth is more than enough. I have started using directadmin on a dell poweredge 2600 and it seems to work great. You don't have to compete on price alone. People HATE the support they get through most providers. Provide good support and don't be afraid to charge a fair price for all this. Most companies/people won't think twice about paying $20 per month for this type of service(more if lots of support is going to be involved). A dozen accounts like this and you have payed for the server with lots to spare. Many of the people who have posted here are correct about the market for cheap crappy hosting being over saturated. So don't be a cheap crappy host.
Bluehost.com offers "unlimited" storage and bandwidth with their standard hosting package. The nice thing about them, is you can host as many domains under the same account as you want, and I think it's like $150 a year now. You couldn't give each of your customers Cpanel access, but that's probably a blessing in disguise anyway. That way, the burden of doing the hosting can be put on their shoulders, and all you have to do is worry about the customer's webpages all for a semi-reasonable fee. I've had an account with them for years now, and it's been my preferred method of including "hosting" for my freelance customers.
you make some great points for sure. i agree with you 100% about the creative people as well. they are so incredibly difficult to please. they should be making their own sites really! the small business folk that are looking for SEO, and an informative site where people can contact them is all most people need. also, i've never seen a problem using frontpage. you don't want to make your entire site in frontpage, but if you're using it simply to write quick HTML like making tables and inserting pictures, then there's nothing wrong with that in my opinion.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
the only way to win is not to play.
Don't do it.
It may have been a profitable venture back in the 90's, but in todays world of $1.99 per month hosting, it is not.
...so don't make it a core offering. It sounds like you add value for your clients by helping them go from "no clue" to "I have a website" which is a pretty repeatable sell for the market you seem to be going after. There are no technology requirements for this business model. Small, mostly static websites with limited audiences do not require much hardware. That old Mac Mini on the shelf can host 20 of them. Still, as most of the responses are saying, "Don't do it." Seriously... concentrate on the sales, hosting is an afterthought. Literally. You get to the end of the process and you turn to your client and say, "So... you wanna host this puppy on GoDaddy or Amazon's EC2?"
I looked at switching about a year ago, and gave them some of the quotes I found. They came back with a slightly higher one than the ones I'd found, but which I accepted because I knew that my problems quickly became their problems and had no such information about their competitors. I'm happy to pay a premium for
Some more concrete advice:
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I don't know of any small catering company with that level of IT infrastructure. OTOH, I don't know of any small catering company that needs anything even remotely resembling that level of IT infrastructure either. Competitively, it's really a wash even though it sounds impressive,
110mb.com offers 110mb (duh) of free hosting. For mySQL and other stuff you can pay a one-time fee. In order to make money in this market, you will have to beat this service. Knowing nothing about hosting or SQL injection attacks, I suggest not doing it.
On the flip side, you can set them up with free hosting accounts...
You will not make money in this endeavor, you might as well give up and go with one of the free hosting sites.
2 stories.
/. reportedly costs about $10.
My brother-in-law has a day job that pays all his bills and then some, but as a hobby, he likes to play with computers. Eventually, he became good at running internet servers - strictly as a hobby. He volunteers for a few non-profit charities and worked out a deal where they pay for his commercial internet connection out of his home and he provides web hosting services and web design for free to them. That's $200 a month, fairly high bandwidth and good SLAs from the ISP for free. He doesn't get paid for any of the time doing it. Very low traffic as everyone here says. It introduces problems for his cable tv bill, since the bill for the ISP (also cable) gets confused ALL THE TIME AS RESIDENTIAL. The cable company is constantly confused since he has a commercial account. Oh, after a 2 week power outage due to a hurricane, he convinced one of the non-profits to provide him with a petrol generator hooked into his home. It will run the A/C, fridge and all the computer gear no problem. However, when power is out that widespread, at most the ISP can handle 6 hours without grid power.
The way that I'd do it is offer value add services and use https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ as the ISP. Heck, let them do all the server garbage - that's the bonehead stuff that isn't difficult or fun after awhile anyway. Your customers don't need to know you're paying less than $10/month (more likely $2) - charge them $50 and still be the cheapest hosting provider out there. Have a premium bandwidth cost built into the contract - that bumps them to $100/month. A hit from
Great suggestion on playing with servers. I'd just like to add that if you want to actually understand what you're administrating, you should probably start with a vanilla Slackware install. You'll have to build from the ground up and understand how each part of the system interacts with the rest. It'll also "cure" any "fear" of using a command line. Because, let's be honest, usually when things go Very Bad, SSH may be the only interface you'll have, even if it's a headless box in your bedroom closet. Unless you like lugging around that old 17" CRT, have an extra LCD lying around, or don't mind the security risks associated with almost all the alternatives to SSH. Also, once you're comfortable with a CLI, you'll be able to solve problems so much more quickly than using a GUI or web interface.
Not that I have anything against Webmin (I actually love it for routine maintenance), but when I'm putting out a fire, I don't want to hunt around the numerous modules to find the correct knobs and buttons; I want to go straight to the problem and nail the sucker down as quickly as possible and I've found the command line the best way to do this. Especially on a thrashing, very unhappy box, when every other interface is either down or effectively inoperable because of the overhead of the service running it.
Also, you've hit the nail on the head about users who "think they know what they want". If they knew what they want, they'd already have done it themselves. Unless they come to you telling you what they're going to set up and trying to size up your options for it, they will be under the assumption that you're going to set it up for them. The people who really know what they want will come to you and say, "I'm going to set up a PHP-5, MySQL and apache stack for a site with X expected traffic and Y expected storage. I'll need Z throughput with A IOP/s. What package do you have that fits this setup, and what is your SLA like?" Everyone else will ask if you do "AJAX-y web two point oh enterprise stuff".
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Whenever you start a business, it's a good idea to retain or at least consult with a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction, who is willing to take you on as a client. You might want to structure your business so as to limit your personal liability, you might want to make sure that you're not violating securities laws, you might want to look into 17 USC 512 -- a whole host of things, too long to get into here. And if you're sure you want to get into this line of work, legal counsel is a good first step before you even think of anything else, because you'll save yourself headache later by doing things correctly from the beginning.
I'm not your lawyer, and this isn't legal advice, but you really should seek some out.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
For 4 years, I ran a small web host specializing in genealogy, with PC servers I ran at home (Win2000, Apache, PHP, MySQL). My little bit of advice is to be very careful about the type of load your servers will experience. Basically what I found is that I could deliver even the most complex and media-rich HTML sites with good speed, but when multiple users run multiple database-driven PHP scripts, forget it. I realized there's no way I could afford the necessary server hardware, and even 3rd party web hosts would be prohibitively expensive for the kind of power needed.
I have had mine for about four years, and I started mostly because of the same reason. I needed a way to not spend too much of my personal time helping my friends deal with crappy web hosts and horrible domain registrars.
..." and bump it up to 10.
$15/month got me a reseller account with a very very nice host. When I was just their customer they treated me like royalty, I love their service. The $15 bought me space, bandwidth and access to WHM, the admin side of Cpanel. I was free to slice it up any way I wanted, and each of my customers would have their own cpanel.
The smart ones knew how to install whatever they wanted without the cpanel automation.
The rest were self reliant enough so cpanel was actually useful.
One of two idiots just couldn't pay attention if their lives depended on it, so it wouldn't matter which method they chose.
The second problem was domain names. Almost everyone was sick of the Netsol prices, but most got burned buying discounted domains elsewhere. Almost by accident I ran into a small domain wholesaler based in India, the reseller account was free so I decided to give them a try.
They are fantastic, four years later and hundreds of domain names purchased and NEVER a problem that could be blamed on them. Every single problem we have had could be traced back to a bad discount registrar trying to screw a customer out of transferring out.
The main problem with doing this is that customer support does take time. I made a point of always being available to anyone that used my services. I was always willing to IM or talk on the phone regardless of how stupid the issue was. Because of it my attrition rate is literally nonexistent.
By "accident" my previous boss overheard that I had my own domain registrar, and that my domains were less than $10 instead of the $35 he was paying.
Overnight I had nailed a 30+ domain customer.
The funny thing is that my hosting provider kept increasing the quotas for my plan, but kept the price frozen. That means I still pay my $15, but now I have 10x the disk space and at least 100x the bandwidth I started with 4 years ago. This allows me to be generous when a customer runs over bandwidth and I let it go "just this time."
They feel like I did them a favor, when all I did was use up a tiny bit of the extra capacity that was not drawing revenue.
Do I make money out of this? It pays itself, and I get some extra cash left. Many times friends ask me about cheap hosting for a family member, so I usually sell them the domain name and give them a small hosting account for free. If I botch something, I give them extra hosting, if it was a BIG screw up I give them a free domain (I don't remember giving away more than 2-3 domains in the past 4 years).
I also play with the allowances just to see how people react to it. For example, I may set a basic account so it has up to 5 parked domains (these point to the root of the account), 5 add-on domains (these are stand-alone within the account), etc. This costs me nothing but when they ask nice I say "just because you are a good customer
Then there are the miscreants. I had one customer overseas, I have no idea where he came from but he immediately bought the biggest plan I had, which was expensive and ate 25% of my resources (and I was not overselling, he DID get 25%). A week later his site auto-shut down due to bandwidth use.
He came back to complain, I explained to him what he had done. He asked how much. I honestly wanted him to go away, so I offered him to temporarily bump him by 1GB for the rest of the month for $100.
He said yes, and paid on the spot.
Less than a week later he was back. Same deal. Another $100.
$300 later he moved his site elsewhere and I never heard from him.
Another customer, also overseas, was good for about 5 domains per year and maybe $200/year worth of websites. The problem is that she IM'ed constantly, and for stupid crap. Every week she would reinstall what
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
The administrative things... payroll, taxes, licenses, etc. eat up a surprising amount of time if you are operating legitimately.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
but if you insist on starting this business, let me know .. you can have my server and clients
Check out the 'PERFECT SERVER HOWTO' on http://www.howtoforge.com/ for your preferred distro. It is all you need for what you want to achieve and 'ISPconfig' costs nothing (unlike some other control panels).
I can only speak of the 'Fedora' 'HOWTO' - you should get good results and have fun doing it.
You only have to have one friend that pays to make your virtual server hire significantly more affordable, chances are that they will not be hammering the server and once you have put in some work getting them setup it will just be a matter of collecting the fees.
I see what the naysayers are saying, however, if you do pick up those 'artist', 'photographer' and other not-so commercial projects you will have an excuse for staying in better touch with people you might otherwise not stay in touch with.
Even if it takes you a whole weekend of fettling I think the effort will be worth the while, have a go with 'ISPconfig' as per tried-and-trusted instructions and take things from there, one project at a time:
http://www.ispconfig.org/index.htm
http://www.howtoforge.com/fedora-8-server-lamp-email-dns-ftp-ispconfig
You might also be interested in getting a few extra domains to practice with. You can get dynamic ones for free at http://www.dyndns.com/ and check that everything (including email) works. Note that you will have to look in your junk email for emails from a dyndns address.
6- Profits!!!
No sig for now.
My apologies, let me attempt to restate my question.
Let's say I get www.myname.com. That site then becomes a basic directory of sites and games within a given genre. One of the sites that I list then comes to me and says, I would like to sign up and use customer1.myname.com as my site.
If i wanted to give them a basic index page with a subdirectory, provide a forum, photo gallery, their own updatable news/info page, etc.
I'm not talking so much about web hosting as pre-built packages to allow them their own site within my existing one.
I have been running a hosting service for 6 years now. We are quite happy with the incomes.. ok, if you only see that you are earning a lot, then you are done.
however it is not easy to:
1- wake up at 2AM because a customer in Spain (we are in latin america) screwed the whole system
because of some sort of rabbit process or 2- same.. with databases going wild and crashing
3- customer calling EVERY day with problems with their emails.. emails that are for sure sent but never arrive... you check the logs and mails are there..just that they somehow never readed it. This is the biggest problem.. mails not arriving, customers unable to check themselves or to read what: quota exceeded, or error dest@domain.com> unbalanced >, or user unknown.. it is a royal pain.
4- resellers? A royal pain, we are getting rid of them and hosting or direct customers.. resellers pays little, demands huge and move to another service as soon as they find the other place gives them 50c/mo disscount.
5- invoicing customers? getting payments from them? IT IS HARD. We have a motto: if the customer does not want to pay on time, then he does not consider our job and must be suspended.
We warn the customer 4 times 30,1 5,7 days before expiration and the day of expiration.. We suspend them 1-3 days after the expiry date... hardly any one can pay before the expiry date.
The funny thing comes later: "you are trying to blackmail me because you suspended my site", "I never got the mail (we keep copies of the warning mails)", etc... in any case, most of them pays.. quite upset because of "the blackmail".. and I wonder myself.. did they call the telco and say the same things when they forget to pay for the phone bills? And the electricity company? We have detected that some of the customers ask you "reactivate me and then I will pay" this is the usual phrase(ok, in several flavours) to say you: "I wont pay you, I just want to take my site off you and ran away" it is a pain, actually.
6- spam: oh god.. this is hard... "why Im receiving spam?" "Im getting like 5 spam mails/day, this is unbeareable", etc, etc, etc.. then setup an antispam service (let's say greylisting): "why are my mails delayed for days?" (days, not minutes... they always exagerate the issues).
7- lack of evidence: NONE of the emails accounts from NOBODY of my company works: This is the most useless phrase I have ever seen.. like if exagerating the problem is the right way to solve it.. at the end, when they explain the problem it is something related to point 3 in one account not in every. We then tend to ignore other claims from the same customer as we know it is a false positive.
They never call, except for complaining.. your server could be working 24x7 for, let's say 10 months.. then your server hiccup because of a bastard running an unoptimized sql query... be ready, calls will rain... specially the "Im running a 10000usd/hour business, you do not have idea of how much I have been affected by this 5 minutes of downtime" we wonder, in front of them "why if you are having such a profitable business will you run your website on a 48usd/year shared hosting"? why dont you rent us a dedicated or vps? Some of them have rented it.. other immediatly start whinning: oh, money is so scarce, we actually are almost broke, etc, etc.
profits are nice, in our case... dealing with the technical details are quite nice... we learn a lot, we get in touch with a lot of interesting customers and situations... but dealing with support is a pain in the ass.
sorry for such a long post... but I was actually needing to let all this shit come out...
There are many reference websites on the subject. One I used in the past is http://www.webhostingtalk.com/.
morcego
I agree with the many comments here that it's a big mistake. At least on its own. I work for a software development company that also offers hosting. We have consistently LOST money on hosting, but offer it anyway (primarily as a courtesy to our custom development clients).
You know what? 95% of your trouble tickets will be generated by 5% of your clients. That's a simple fact. They will drive you out of your mind with the stupidest problems imaginable, eating up time that could otherwise be spent on actually generating money. ("Why isn't my PHP page rendering? Oh, it was my mistake? Why do I have to pay you to troubleshoot that?")
If you want to be able to pay your bills, either set this up as a write-off associated with something that actually generates income, or just stay away from it altogether.
I have done this for about 10 years now, and the *only* reasons I got into it and stayed with it are;
1) I was already doing websites for friends and a couple of clients. I had already had a job being responsible for maintaining someone else's servers. ie there was not a huge learning curve.
2) The company I worked for made the decision to change hardware and software platforms, and sold me their existing gear for pennies. ie no big upfront costs.
3) I now work for a telephone company and can get a circuit to my home for a very reasonable rate. ie low ongoing costs.
In conclusion, unless you have experience, the resources to put together a small server farm, and your ongoing costs can be easily covered (even if some clients leave you), don't do it yourself.
The general market for cheap hosting is overcrowded. There's no money and customer support is very similar to sticking pins in your eyes. Instead, find a niche market such as privately owned restaurants, jewelers, or topless dancers. The more you work with them the more you learn about their needs. In a short time you'll understand their business so well that building and hosting sites becomes trivial. You end up with very little support because you can anticipate needs and problems so well.
A lot of these "Ask Slashdot" questions are from people who would be better off being told to just fucking google it.
It's not "elitist" to say that they should do bit of basic research first; or are slashdot users mostly such low-expectation under-achieving slobs who crave any sort of interaction, even from someone who doesn't care enough about what they want to do to take the time to actually *learn* enough to ask smart questions? If they don't give enough of a shit to do some research first, I don't see why anyone should give enough of a shit to help them.
Really, this ranks right up there with people asking us to do their fucking HOMEWORK for them! "For my class project I want to do blah blah blah ... please tell me how to do it ..."
Even the slashvertisements are better.
Kevin Smith on Prince
1) Try the admin login at the ISPconfig site:
:-)
http://www.ispconfig.org/demo.htm
Prod around and you will see it does what you want.
2) Use howtoforge to set it up on your distro
While the flood of bitter and jaded experience has been overwhelming, I appreciate the occasional individual that has taken the time here to actually answer the question.
:)
I think what the majority of posters fail to realize is that I am not looking to do this as a full time business. I want to learn to do this, because I believe that learning new things is fun and rewarding. I want to do this because I DO have a niche market, as well as people that are already willing to pay me to learn this and do it for them. I already have several dozen people that want me to do this on their behalf, so I'm not worried about struggling to find customers, find my place, etc. I just want to be able to give a couple dozen people their own websites under my domain with some preconfigured options to make it easier for them.
Thanks
OK, so at least you have some sort of a niche focus, which better than the "hosting for all" idea that it looked like originally.
:-):
:-).
.. you did it yourself!
I can only support the other poster here who mentioned ISPconfig, but he/she(/it?) didn't make it clear that howtoforge.com will be incredibly helpful to you (to the point that I would STRONGLY recommend taking a subscription).
You have a few challenges that you need to work out before you're likely to make money but still have a life (and don't expect a life in, say, the first year anyway
Controlling costs: make sure you spend WELL. Don't buy the cheapest crap going because it will fail when you can least afford it- stick to medium range kit, and for God's sake don't forget a backup & recovery strategy AND TEST IT REGULARLY. Stay away from gadgets until you have the basics well under control. Also expect zero income for a few months (common mistake in many startups).
Controlling income: I assume you'll work on invoice basis. Know that they teach people in management school to pay as late as possible because it's a free loan (large companies paying late is no accident). Make your due dates as short as you can get away with AND FOLLOW UP. Up to you if you send an upfront reminder or not, but anything you can do to automate incoming payments (direct debits, credit card authorisation) will help. The moment a payment is late, follow up (don't delay, after all, they already HAD a waiting time) and give them another week. After that, you should have a clause in your T&Cs that allows you to add 10% to the bill, and park the service until the bill is paid in full. Two such suspensions and the account should be moved to advance payments for at least 3 months.
The lesson here is that you're better off losing bad payers than giving yourself stress - you need to pay in time too and the cost of chasing them is not worth it with low margins (credit buros will also cost you a percentage of earnings, your choice). Payment morale is under your control. If you give in once you're taking a gamble which sometimes isn't a bad idea (we all occasionally screw up IMHO). If you give in twice you're a fool because you have just set a trend of bad payment, and after 3 times it will be hard to back to proper control "because you allowed it last time". The moment clients know you're serious about proper payment they can choose: pay and stay, or leave. Much more honest for everyone - VERY hard to achieve.
And after that comes the usual stuff. Make sure you have help with admin and find a decent accountant - file income and expense as soon as you make it in a way your accountant can directly work with it. Leave it too long and it becomes a mountain - at it's top there's no oxygen.. And NEVER let anyone talk you into playing games with the various taxes.
You don't play with Mr Taxman, because Mr Taxman has the nation's resources to come after you, and small guys are easy to make examples of. If you need to play *those* games to stay profitable I personally suggest you close the shop or start packing your toothbrush. Tax games are for criminals and VERY large companies (I'm avoiding the logical comment here
Good luck. It's not easy to start on your own, but unless you're at board level you have much more control over your job and if you make money -
Get a server over at serverbeach.com or some place simular. You can get linux servers with plesk for roughly $70 per month and up.
Both cpanel and plesk allow you to allow automatic account creation, meaning people can sign up on your site and have accounts created for them, auto billing, etc. You can setup different packages i.e. more bandwidth, disk space, domain names and so on.
Also with these systems it makes it very simple to manage your server. I only host my own sites and use plesk because of how easy it is to manage dns, email, domains, etc. Well worth the 10-20 bucks amonth for the plesk license.
TruePunk | Games
I dont know who you are, but I like your attitude and you are closer to my age. I dont have a website but would like to start one someday. Send me your card. skipmichael@gmail.com
Freedom is not FREE
Go rent a couple webservers from an established datacentre, get a decent hosting platform (WHM/cpanel isn't bad for ease of use, but sacrifices customization, VHCS2 is free but isn't updated much, but if you're into Linux and PHP, it's easily customizable. InterWorx is also a popular choice for a streamlined control panel).
Once your servers are functional start selling space. While the hosting over the internet market is saturated, I imagine there's plenty of local businesses in your area who'd be interested in hosting provided by a local company.
I started out renting 2 servers from Layered Technologies for about $230cdn a month. I then approached a lot of local small business and meted out web hosting in 3 different plans (the most popular being $24.95cdn a month, or $19.99 if you pay for a year in advance). I'm now renting 6 servers and have roughly 80 clients (mostly small business with low-traffic sites). I'm bringing in about 1800 above server rental and other costs. It's not a windfall, but it's not difficult to do and it requires only a small outlay in the start.
It's easy, and as long as you stay ahead in security updates (not to mention some good security-concious practices) you'll be off to the races.
That's a pretty ignorant statement. What you actually mean is "I can't or won't work with people who think differently than myself".
Think about it - creativity wouldn't be creativity if it didn't involve the use of the imagination and looking at things in new or different ways. Moreover, think about this - creativity is not limited to artistic types like writers, painters, photographers, etc., it can also be found in business types, engineers, scientists, and so on.
It does seem as if you don't want to work with the sorts of people who'll want beautiful sites with meaningful content that appeals to their particular target audience, possibly even fashionable or trendy sites, using the latest fads - or *gasp* perhaps something radically different from what everyone else is doing. If you're limiting yourself only to business folks then that suggests you only do business sites, which tend to be plain, straightforward, no fancy bells and whistles, etc.
It IS easier to work with the latter kind of site. You're just lazy. For most of the projects I work on, I would never hire you based on such a limited portfolio.
checkout slicehost.com and howtforge.com where u take it from there is up to you.
Just a note here. Most of the larger hosting providers are also ISP's. As they have free upstream bandwidth as most of their customers are using downstream for browsing, etc. There are much better market's to be in than webhosting.
When all else fails, hire me!
Thanks for the post - that's really great advice, and a refreshing change from all the negative posts so far.
Unfortunately it's not the kind of advice that Kwirl needs. He's looking for some way to host web sites for his friends and make "some small residual income if a market exists." That is what the negative posts were right to latch onto. He's setting himself up for heaps of unpaid or low paid work. The only sensible and sustainable way to approach web hosting is from the business side, and that means you look for a market first. Note that the exception to the naysaying comes from a person who is not in the typical age group and uses Frontpage. He's obviously not in the business of providing web hosting to his friends. He's not the guy who could fix your computer blindfolded. His priority is to be a reliable business partner. In business speak: You have to provide solutions, not just web hosting. What the other comments are telling you is that it's most likely a good idea to outsource the web hosting part of your solutions, because that is not where the money is made.
First problem is that you need a fully automated billing/provisioning system before going live. I like http://freeside.biz/ - but like everything else, it will require some customization. It doesn't matter what you use. But use something. This was my second (and perhaps my largest) mistake.
after you have the billing system setup, get it integrated with provisioning on servers you have at home (you don't want to start paying for hosting until you are ready to put customers online. In fact, I would argue that it's better to buy more hardware than you need than to buy more hosting than you need. If you blow a lot of money on hardware and then fail it, you can at least sell it for a fraction of what you paid. If you blow a lot of money on hosting and then fail it, like I did, you are out of luck - Note, you can get awesome bandwidth deals if you buy a lot at once and sign a long contract. Don't. pay the higher prices for the ability to keep your pre-pay closer to what you need.)
After this you need to decide if you want to buy or rent servers. I like buying, because I like having lots of ram, and most places who rent charge you through the nose for ram. (which is odd, as I can go to newegg and get 4Gb of unbuffered ECC for around $100) As far as I can tell, most deadicated servers are priced such that if you keep them for more than 3-6 months, you are better off buying servers and co-locating them.
Just send your friends to http://comfypage.com and they can get a free site including a forum. They get what they want and you dont have to babysit a server.
>> and a dedicated 24/7 tech support person with excellent dish washing skills?
> Competitively, it's really a wash even though it sounds impressive,
Let's hope they wash.
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