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
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