How do I start a hosting company ?

FrankZFrankZ Moderator
edited December 5 in Help

A link to this post can be inserted by members into those threads that we get from time to time on this forum.

@teamacc said:

Stability
Price-performance ratio (this includes a LOT, from amount of resources, network quality, uptime, cpu steal, hdd/ssd speeds etc)
Expectation management
Unique selling points (like unique locations, extremely low pricing, extremely high stability etc)

Since you're a provider starting out, the stability point can mostly be ignored in any ads you post, since your track records is non-existent. However, any blip in stability will have huge negative impact on that point.

Price-performance would force you to either sell at a loss, oversell (see: expectation management) or have huge upfront costs to buy your own ip blocks or your own hardware. (or, in the case of quadranet, have an inside-man at the datacenter that sells you stuff at a loss, then gets arrested for it when it comes out)

Expectation management: This is closely related to price-performance. If you advertise as "we have 100% uptime" while on some cheap network connection, you're gonna get bashed over the head with it later. Similar to "we place the utmost importance on our clients data" while being a team of one, with the only "backups" being the 1 in your raid10 array. (say it with me: "raid is not a backup")

Unique selling points like unique locations can make you a more attractive host, whilst at the same time taking a risk with limiting your market to the local population. It's a balance to work with. Otherwise, unique selling points could be dynamic vm scaling (easy increase/decrease resources, easily move your vm between locations) or other non-market-default things like billing-per-minute, long-term customer benefits etc.

Overall, youll have a hard road ahead of you to stand out from the crowd if you're just a 5-usd-a-month for 1gb-of-ram-20gb-disk in any location (as long as it's in that one location in the USA), with a cheap network. You're gonna have to work for it, or take a loss until your reputation has increased to such a point that you can either increase pricing (although mostly by a little bit), get bulk discounts from your upstream (due to economies of scale), or happen to somehow land a business client that's truly making money off of your services, allowing you to charge a lot more to this client.

Providing support will keep you up at all hours, working weekends. Also, support comes in waves, especially if there's issues with the datacenter, making all clients ticket in at the same time. Pro-active communication should be a thing there, "hey clients, we have issues with dc, here's a quick recap of the issue, here's the expected time-to-fix" followed by a "this was indeed the issue, here's how we resolved it for now, and here's how we're gonna prevent it in the future".

Overall, good luck. Work on your forum communication skills a bit too.

I'll add to this OP any reasonable suggestions from the comments below.

Thanked by (3)admax user123 bikegremlin

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