8 months in - Ask me anything on what it's like to run a small provider.
ZizzyDizzyMC
Hosting Provider
Well it's been a while!
It's been 8 months since Z Plus has been public! Woo!
I've been busy irl, and working a lot. Haven't had time to release new offers since I've been busy re-tooling things and working out ways to provide the best service possible to my clients. I wanted to make a thread to talk about a few things I've learned along the way. For those who may just be buyers and are interested in what it's like, or people wanting to get into the hosting business.
Lets start off with how it started.
2014 - I start a project to archive ponies, quickly getting lots of TB of data.
2016 - My project starts offering hosting to other pony websites for free.
2020 - I start a website that gets attacked, and cancel cultured a few dozen times, I respond by getting an IP block and starting my own host, knowing that 99% of the abuse mails sent were fraudulent and were poor attempts at self-flagging.
2022 - World is cooking and I start offering invite-only hosting for FOSS projects, friends, open source, at-risk sites where funding was low / non-existent.
2023 - I offer my first public hosting offer here as a test of the equipment, software, billing support etc. It was wildly successful but I'll admit the service SUCKED. I ran that for about 5 months before ending sales entirely, and letting clients drain off the node until there was one left, which I paid them to leave / migrate so I could decommission the Intel Compute Stick from service.
2024 - I offer my second public hosting offer, this time focused on a niche in the market for low bandwidth, high storage capacity. This offer is still going and has been successful in the sense that there's been relatively little issue.
2025 - Earlier this year I started trialing a high performance compute option with high storage abilities. We suffered a long outage due to a destructive weather event. Various small issues that took some time to track down and fix. I have committed to long term support and building better infrastructure. We recently got AC in our server room now, which means the equipment is a lot happier. Next is going to be backup power, and internet. My number 1 priority is still going to be data integrity, so even if everything is turned off, as long as client data is not lost I still consider it a success. Issues with networking to resolve, bad routes etc.
Ask me anything, about problems I needed to solve or overcome, just wanna chat.
Comments
How have you managed finances so far?
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
any $7 dealz
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
Are you selling out to PureVoltage ?
vps9hostname is available. affbrrHow do you manage the carpel tunnel syndrome?
Michael from DragonWebHost & OnePoundEmail
How much profit have you made so far? What are the margins like?
This is good. Keep trying. Keep learning.
Maybe LES has a private providers thread for those who are registered to collaborate. I know OGF goes. Have a network community to help. Ask questions here too.
Good luck on your business and hope it booms.
$5/yr deals pls
Insert signature here, $5 tip required
Clopping, obviously.
I'm giving people shells on a 486 before but I would never consider time sharing a compute stick.
My pronouns are like/subscribe.
So far I have enough clients to cover IP costs / ARIN every year. Being how I haven't really advertised beyond my initial thread this is expected. Average invoice is around $4 / month, about $1 goes to fees and taxes.
Quite a few honestly, better off waiting for the official release of our 9900x systems with redundant VM drives. The testing node has held up quite well though. Not yearly though, I learned very quickly that 7/year is for established providers to get their name out, and is strictly loss leader product unless it's on ipv6, in which case it's profitable - if you don't consider workload for abuse tickets.
Margins at my scale is 0, however if I tripled my client numbers I'm looking at about 100 / month in profit per ~35 clients on average. You're gonna have a lot of variance between providers. I don't overprovision, which lowers my maximum theoretical profit margin by a considerable amount - it vastly increases customer experience though when it comes to resources.
We'll know for sure what margins look like on newer hardware when everyone on the old storage system gets the free upgrade to the new one - so I can turn off the old hardware that's guzzling electricity.
I'm broke, not poor. Conisdering I'm going to own everything required to run the business because I own websites that require this level of hardware it is extremely unlikely I'd ever sell to anyone, much less someone who considers their voltage to be pure. I like my voltage dirty, so the UPS has a reason to exist.
I suffer.
I mean it wasn't too bad for clients, it performed better than quite a number of offers here at the time. For me, however, it was a nightmare to configure networking via wifi. However if you know of a hypervisor that works on a 486 I have a few I'd offer up for memes.
Fuck this 24/7 internet spew of trivia and celebrity bullshit.
DesQview. Possibly.
My pronouns are like/subscribe.
Make sure you get Desqview/X though
It's hard to port xoj over to X11R4.
My pronouns are like/subscribe.
LOL ... I hadn't seen that one.
It's been memory holed. Can probably still find it on an old slackware CD.
My pronouns are like/subscribe.
My best wishes.
Check my closet or other cave
Free Hosting at YetiNode | MicroNode| Cryptid Security | URL Shortener | LaunchVPS | ExtraVM | Host-C | In the Node, or Out of the Loop?
Is "ponies" industry slang?
https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/brony/
Its a rabbit hole I do not recommend digging in, tbh.
Basically, some extra autistic individuals liking ponies quite a bit more than an ordinary person. It attracts a fair share of degenerates too, but I'm not qualified to speak on the % of the total "pony" community these individuals are.
Controversies around the letter group of individuals, were most likely the reason behind cancel campaigns against "pony" websites.
No I'm just a brony with so much hardware I wanted to share my love of archiving. Of all the sites that attracted attention it was always the archives I hosted.
Rabbit hole goes deep, there's a lot of crazies tbh. Not that I'm not crazy, but if I'm telling you I'm one of the more stable ones that should tell ya something. Other notable achievements include having princess luna engraved on a part on the ISS and there's a deep sea diving rig with pones on it. Surprising amount of bronies and furries run the tech industry now. It's really because autistic people are good at it and autism tends to attract other hobbies.
This DesQView X stuff is awesome. Thanks for teaching me something new.
$3/yr deals ?
Why?
Do you really consider 8 months a period that enables you already to give good advice? a pregnancy takes longer and even then a woman probably cannot really tell you much about having a child.
with all the offer switches it looks more like you haven't even found out yet, if it's boy or girl ;-) ;-)
To be fair, he never says anything about good advice just his experiences. Even just learning what went wrong might be useful/interesting.
Hmm okay, maybe I understood it wrong then... carry on.
Pretty much this.
I've only had a few different offers, I removed plans that weren't in use as I decided to focus on 1 subject rather than branching out - branches create leaves and leaves require regular maintenance and pruning. That's something I've learned already in 8 months.
As for migrating clients over from one offer to another, it's a direct upgrade for the client as they'll be moving from Xeon E5-2690v4's to Ryzen 9900x's with the same ram and cpu allotment. Much faster, granted it is also going to be a pain to migrate on my end.
It'll end up saving power too, which saves me money as a provider since I pay for power. This makes my offers more sustainable in the end, and makes it closer to being profitable. The newer setup is scalable as well, so I can scale up if needed / desired. I probably won't though, I like the smaller aspect of it.
I am sure you have an actual job that pays for your food, rent/mortgage, outings, etc.
Curious what it is.
The all seeing eye sees everything...
If he/she is from a middle/lower income country, web hosting can possibily pay for food/rent/mortgages and probably have a lot more to spare
Alright, I have ignored this thread for long enough... So here are my questions:
1. How many times a week do you cry into your server rack?
2. Have you named your uptime monitor, and do you whisper to it at night?
3. On a scale from 1 to "I now speak fluent router," how much sleep have you lost?
4. What’s more unstable: your service or your mental state during a DDoS?
5. Do your family members still think you "just fix Wi-Fi for a living"?
6. At what point did you realize your cat was your unofficial sysadmin?
7. Do you dream of load balancers or do the load balancers haunt your dreams?
8. What’s your favorite flavor of burnout: DNS loop or billing system bug?
9. Have you ever tried to pay rent with bandwidth?
10. When you say "small provider," do you mean the servers fit under your bed?
Never make the same mistake twice. There are so many new ones to make.
It’s OK if you disagree with me. I can’t force you to be right.
He is from the USA.
$7
My pronouns are like/subscribe.
I do cybersecurity as a day job, my hobbies include everything from VR to building the electronics required to do so, servers, archiving, I do mechanic work and trade cheap beater cars. That sort of thing. This is just a hobby I let get too big.