How to start your own web hosting business?

How to start your own web hosting business?

Starting your own web hosting now a days is a much easier process. You can start a web hosting business at four levels depending on the investment you want to make in starting your first venture. The four levels are stated below:

  • Level 1 – As a reseller of some other hosting company.
  • Level 2 – By owning your own VPS (Virtual Private Server).
  • Level 3 – By renting your own dedicated box at some of the data center.
  • Level 4 – and finally by collocating your own hardware at some data center.

LEVEL 1

Level 1 is the most easiest way to enter into the web hosting business. Here the investment is minimal. You just need ti be the reseller of a big hosting company like Hostgator etc. For this you have to give your parent company a fixed monthly rental which normally ranges from 10$ to 100$. You will get a fixed amount of space and bandwidth which you can resell to your customers at a price decided by you.

In this category i will always recommend you to go with a host which offers realistic features like fixed amount of bandwidth and disk space.I am always against the host which offer unlimited space and bandwidth because there is unlimited in this world.

My suggestion would be to go with a smaller plan and than migrate to bigger plans as your customer base grows.

LEVEL 2

Level 2 will give you some more privileges eg. root access like a dedicated box. At the same it will give you more CPU and RAM power. The VPS is just like a dedicated box with little less power. Now there are two types of VPS available in the market.

  • Managed
  • Un managed

As i had already mentioned that your VPS is just like a dedicated server where you have full access over everything from installing your OS to installing your web server. This means you should be perfect in server administration and Linux in order to handle a VPS your self. If you are perfect in these things than you can go with Un managed VPS which is much cheaper than Managed one. If you are not familiar with server administration than you can either hire a server administrator or go with Managed solution.

I will always just a manged solution because it will really save you from getting humiliated in front of you customers whenever there occurs some problem in your VPS.

Go with Level 2 solution only when you have a comparatively larger customer base  or in case you can invest some more money into your web hosting venture.

LEVEL 3

Level 3 is quite costlier solution but it will give you full power of server. In dedicated servers also there are two types which are exactly same as that of VPS. Types are:-

  • Managed
  • Un Managed

Go for managed only when you have some sort experience as a server administrator other wise go for a managed solution.

This is a costlier solution and i would suggest you to go with it only when your customer base is large enough to support your box. The price of a decent box at a good data center in USA ranges from 100$ to 1000$ per month.

LEVEL 4

Level 4 is basically a solution for those hosts who are well established in this industry. In this solution you will basically purchase a server from the market and than rent a rack, electricity, maintenance and bandwidth from a data center. This comparatively cheaper than renting a dedicated box in the long run.

At the end of the day the main factor in running a successful web hosting business is the end user support or customer support. There are thousands of new web hosting  companies coming into play every day but 99% of them will disappear within a month. They are known as fly by night hosts.

If you are serious in starting a web hosting than you need to provide great customer support and yea always rent from a well established hosting company that will save you more dollars than going with unreliable and cheap host in the long run.

Contributors:

Vikas Sinha, Rajiv Gupta and Aman Singh

Godaddy’s 4GH hosting sucks

Hello all of you

Through UB7.NET i am going to present all of you a brief review of Godaddy’s 4GH hosting service. First of all i am not a professional blogger and also the website concerned is not a heavy traffic website.

Godaddy is quite popular for their coupon codes. Yes, i do believe that they are good at managing domains and also their prices are quite affordable but their other services especially hosting service is not at all good.

Recently only godaddy launched their new set of hosting plans known as 4GH plans i.e. 4th generation plans. On their comparison page they have divided the entire hosting industry into 4 generations (don’t know how they are dividing) i.e. 1Gh,2GH,3GH and 4GH. They have placed companies like justhost, hostgator under the 2GH column(STRANGE!) and they are placing themselves under the 4GH column.

But truly speaking guys, their servers are slow like a snail. But the most annoying thing about their hosting is that every task is performed in a queue i.e. you have to wait for atleast 3o minutes for the creation of database or another scenario is that you have to even wait for installing scripts under your account.

The thing 4GH hosting is just a marketing gimmick to fool all those newbies who are searching for their first website hosting. They are not at all good for dynamic websites but yea in case if you just want plain a html site then you can go for them otherwise stay away from them.

Here is the screen shot of the comparison(taken from godaddy’s website

Godaddy's 4GH hosting sucks
Click to open in a new window

Bina

 

Hostgator luring new customers through their fake advertisement of reseller plans

Hostgator.COM the so called giant of the hosting industry is now indulged in new tricks to make more money. They are advertising a very good but fake reseller plan on Google Adwords network. When i had first witnessed this advertisement, i actually got amazed because i always think that hostgator is one such hosting company that is bit pricier than most of the other hosting companies for same plans but that advertisement really changed my mind and i became really interested in getting one of that advertised plan.

The plan is a reseller hosting plan offering 6000 GB bandwidth and 600 GB space with unlimited accounts.

But on their site presently the most premium reseller plan offer you 200 GB space and 1400 GB bandwidth that too for massive 100$

I had actually never used hostgator but had heard lot of good about them but from now onwards i will hardly have any believe in them (Cheat Gator)

Comparing some of the most popular domain registrars

In this short and simple review i am going to compare some of the most popular domain registrars among masses. Here in this review we are taking the domain extension as .COM. These are as follows:

  1. Godaddy.com
  2. Name.com
  3. namecheap.com
  4. enom.com
  5. register.com

Godaddy

First of all i am starting with Godaddy, the most popular domain registrar. The main reason for this popularity of Godaddy is the coupon system which actually provides discount to the customer during the process of the purchasing the domain. But customers never keep this thing in mind that those coupons can be used only for first purchase, not for renewals. People think that they can also renew the domain at same price but that’s wrong. It’s just a very clever trick  played by Godaddy to cheat customers. Now one question must be coming in all of your minds is that if they are cheating thier customers openly than why still Godaddy is one of the largest registrars. I will answer this question in this way that at the end of term of the domain suppose  a customer becomes aware of the fact they are being cheated by Godaddy  than also they will find transfering a domain from one registrar to other a headache and forcefully decided to shed some extra cents at  Godaddy.

Now the main question is what about the real pricing of a domain purchased from Godaddy.com.

A .COM from Godaddy costs 11.99$+18 cents which is costing about 12.17$ without coupons. If you are lucky than you may get a discount coupon available to be used at Godaddy. Most of the users these days also want private registration (means to hide the information present in the whois) and Godaddy charges a premium amount for this service also i.e. around 2$ making the effective cost of 14.17$for a single .COM.

Name.com

I will not write essay Name.com like i did for Godaddy.

A .COM from Name.com costs around 9.99$ + 2$for private registrations making a total of 11.99$

Namecheap.com