Hi all i am thinking about starting to offer hosting on my vps partly to help with costs but also because i like running sites and offering great support i currently run a free forum hosting service which i am selling so am looking for a new project. i have experience with whm and cpanel i have used my current vps for a few years now with no troubles no downtime that i can recall.

 

 

What i would like to know is, is it really worth starting something like this seeing as there are so many hosts these days?

 

My market would be at personal/small business sites and will be offering three options. Free, personal and business

 

I have have not yet decided the figures but was just wondering really if it was worth it would i really get any business considering how many hosts are out there?

Hey Gav

 

It really depends too on if you are able to offer anything "different" to the run of the mill stuff that hundreds and thousands of so-called companies are already offering.

 

Selling shared hosting from a VPS though wouldnt be advisable as the disk input/output is still shared with all other VPS nodes on your physical server, so you would be far better if you had your own proper dedicated server, something running RAID5, 3disks or more minimum.

 

Find out the proper spec of the current physical server hosting your VPS, and ask the host what its maximum throughput capacity is, and what its current average throughput is, to see if there is any room for your plans.

Hey Gav

 

It really depends too on if you are able to offer anything "different" to the run of the mill stuff that hundreds and thousands of so-called companies are already offering.

 

Selling shared hosting from a VPS though wouldnt be advisable as the disk input/output is still shared with all other VPS nodes on your physical server, so you would be far better if you had your own proper dedicated server, something running RAID5, 3disks or more minimum.

 

Find out the proper spec of the current physical server hosting your VPS, and ask the host what its maximum throughput capacity is, and what its current average throughput is, to see if there is any room for your plans.

 

Ok here is my current specs of the vps

 

1 GB Burst RAM

384 MB Guaranteed RAM

15 GB Storage

500 GB Monthly Transfer

100 Mbps Uplink Port

4 IP Addresses

Unlimited Domains

Unlimited User Accounts

CentOS 5 Operating System

cPanel

 

Minimum Guaranteed Server Specs

Dual Xeon 3 GHz or Better

8 GB Registered ECC RAM

U320 SCSI HD in Hardware RAID 10

Zero Downtime During Drive Failure

Hot-Swap Drives and Fans

Replaceable on the Fly

Dual Gigabit Network Interfaces

 

And input/output

http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k95/gavp...NewPicture2.jpg

In terms of making money online there are many many more areas of endeavour to think about rather than hosting. There is so much competition these days - you have to be cheaper, you have to offer more, you have to have better, longer support hours, you have to have faster servers, you have to have more features...

 

Do you like going on holiday and being able to switch off completely? Forget that if you're a small hosting operation.

Do you ever not have internet access for a few hours at a time? When you're a small hosting company with customers to support, you need to be able to access the internet always.

 

So like I said, there are many areas you can put your effort into online that will probably not only pay better, but be less stressful and less competitive.

The hosting market (especially shared/resller) is extremely saturated and very low margin. It is very hard to break in to these days.

 

If you wish to get in to it in order to cover your costs i'd suggest you sell to friends and family if they need hosting. Whilst you like giving good support, do you also like being woken up to do just that at 2am, then again at 2.30am and yet again at 4am? If you are going to run the service on your own, you need to not sleep very much! Hiring staff, especially for 24x7 cover is not cheap.

 

As others have said, if you intend to build a viable business from hosting, you will need a unique selling point; there are very few that people have not already thought of and are actively marketing! Bear in mind that you will also need to spend extra time on doing accounts and meeting all the new obligations that running a business entails.

 

Its not a decision to be made lightly. If you do decide to go ahead, however... good luck!

having such minimal specs you wont be able to offer a service as good as current companys, right now it is hard to get into the hosting buiness unless you actually have money and business experience and obviously technical experience, you need to make yours stand out from the rest, what can yours give that the big companys can't, thats were alot of people say it can't give really anything so... i would use your hosting maybe for your clients, i wouldnt make a host company. you tend to see most of the hosting company owners have actually worked for some time, to collect the money to break from their job to setup there new one.