Web hosting is the business of providing storage space and easy access to a website. It is located in a fiercely competitive industry, yet it can be very profitable when done right. A hosting business will rent a certain amount of bandwidth and storage space for a certain amount of time, for a certain fee. The money you make as a business owner comes from the difference between the cost of operating your servers and customer service (or reseller costs) and the amount you charge your customers.
1. Choose a reseller service keeping in mind the needs and criteria of your niche. For example, if your niche is WordPress, your reseller service should have comprehensive support and software for WordPress installation and maintenance.
2. Buy Reseller Hosting Packages – Start as big or small as you want, you can always expand once you get real customers
3. Build your website around the reseller company’s API and integrate either the provided billing system or your own billing system, determine what services you can offer and what services you should offer. For example, many hosts offer shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated servers. If you have 3 different options for one type of service, customers are more likely to choose the middle ground between low and high end – make sure you make the most profit from the middle level option. 4. Promote your business with Google Ads and social media. 5. Expand your services whenever necessary. You may not need to handle your own servers for your business, often you can upgrade to a dedicated server reseller package to handle the influx of customers.
At-Home Server
Cost of entry: A or B are both viable options depending on the need
A. About $1000 for used blade servers and chassis, $100/month for maintenance, power and freelance customer support staff, $100/month for bandwidth. plus a lot of time and expertise
B. Total around $800 for a PC server setup with 2.5GHz+ dual core CPU, 1TB hard drive, and 4GB RAM
Another option that a startup hosting business may have is an at-home server. This option is for the more technically savvy business owner who wants the freedom to manage their own server(s). This guide will not go into details of setting up an at-home server, we will only look at the basics of setting up and operating a server at home.
Hardware (Option A)
Your home server can take many forms. The simplest setup can be any machine with a 2.5GHz+ dual-core CPU (Intel i3), 1TB hard drive and 4GB of RAM – this is to ensure smooth operation of a hundred or more shared client websites during peak hours . You can even use your own computer for this purpose! However, depending on the type and age of the computer you use, this guide recommends purchasing or building a new machine. Older computers are unreliable, slow, and quite noisy during peak CPU load. Your setup will also need a stable and high speed internet connection, power supply, and cooling. This guide recommends placing your server in a discreet location with a wired connection (such as a basement)
Hardware (Option B)
Alternatively, if you feel you need more computational power density in less space, you can set up a blade server. Blades are modular servers stripped down to the basics, ensuring high density computing with low power input. Blade servers are assembled with a chassis that can hold anywhere between 2 to 14 blades. The blades themselves are found inside the chassis, which contains a management unit that allows access to each blade, and provides network, storage connections for each blade.
Each blade is its own server with multiple cores and hard drives, but the setup may have a shared storage system. Unlike a regular computer, the entire chassis requires only a mouse, keyboard, video display, and network connection.
The industry average shared hosting blade server will host 2500 shared hosting customers. Your home server is likely to host fewer clients initially. The more you can put on one server, the cheaper it will be per customer. Naturally if the server is full your cost per customer will only be around $40/month for the first year – if you charge $3.99/month, you can make a profit of $8 per customer for the first year. The initial cost includes validating the customer’s credit card and making sure they are steered in the right direction from installing WordPress, to custom development with a drag and drop web builder. Plus we have electricity, HVAC, bandwidth, and hardware costs.
Software
You have the option to choose between Unix/Linux based systems and Windows based systems. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages and the differences are mostly technical. However, Unix/Linux based systems use significantly less resources.
It is worth practicing setting up a server before starting your business. If you’re confident in your technical knowledge, and want to practice setting up and running your own server, try following this guide to setting up your own personal server: http://arstechnica.com/ gad gets/2012/11/how-to-set-up-a-safe-and-secure-web-server
Internet Connection
Home servers present a unique challenge to the web hosting business owner: Internet connection. One thing is that most ISPs or broadband providers do not allow their users to host public websites on their network. We suggest that you thoroughly research the terms of service of your Internet provider and proceed with setting up a server at home only if your ISP explicitly allows the hosting of websites. If they don’t, you have the option of contacting your ISP to work out a specialized service package for your business needs or finding another ISP that allows hosting.
Your business will depend on the stability, latency and speed of both the upload and download connections provided by the ISP. ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line), cable or fiber services are mostly asymmetric, which means that for most providers upload speeds will be significantly slower than download speeds. Your business will need fast upload speeds to provide your customers with the fastest possible loading speeds.
Another problem with Internet connections is that most services use dynamic IP addresses, where the IP address changes every time you connect to the network. As a web host, you need one or more static IP addresses.
Steps To Set Up A Server At Home
1. Contact your ISP and prepare a package in which they unblock the ports required for hosting, and ask for a static IP address instead of the dynamic IP address usually provided.
2. Research and buy a server setup, blade or a simple PC that suits your needs
3. Set it up in your home, ensuring that the server is accessible with a stable wired internet connection (see the installation section of this guide)
4. Research and set up the operating system and required server software
5. Link your server to your already designed website and decide what services to offer
6. Promote Your Hosting Business with Online Marketing
Datacenter Colocation
Cost of entry: Varies A colocation center is a large commercial data center that rents equipment, space, and bandwidth to users and businesses alike. In the web-hosting world, renting a datacenter means taking advantage of the colocation center’s economies of scale – reducing the costs of uptime, maintaining redundant systems, and operating costs. Using colocation services is a middle ground between building your own private datacenter (in this case an at-home server) and going the reseller route. Renting a datacenter will ensure instant scalability, almost 100% uptime, security, and professional technical support. It will also give you full control over the physical server setup, its data, and the software installed on the server. Managed colocation is often referred to as dedicated server rental. If you’re not fully prepared or qualified to build, manage, and run a colo server, and you don’t have the money for support staff, it may be easier to get a managed server – or even go the reseller hosting route.
Installation
If you’ve chosen the reseller route, you can skip this section! The good thing about Reseller is that it does not require any technical knowledge to set up a server. This section will focus on (or rather, outline) the installation required for a home or colo server.
Operating System
The operating system is the backbone of your server – and there are only two big options, Windows or Linux. The biggest advantage of Linux is its freedom and versatility. Linux OSes are free, and most of the software you need for hosting is open source. Administration is certainly more difficult for those used to Windows, but it’s not that difficult. Linux servers are much more popular than Windows, and even inspired the LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP.
Windows, on the other hand, offers familiarity and ease of use in exchange for the high startup costs associated with software licensing. Installing an operating system is relatively simple, and there are countless guides and examples on the Internet. cPanel will provide instructions for installing CentOS based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As an added bonus, installing the cPanel-provided version will also automatically install cPanel and WHM. Installing Windows is also extremely simple, and more information can be found at this Microsoft article: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/installing-reinstalling-windows#1TC=windows-7.
Hosting Control Panel And Automation Software
While there are many different types of web hosting control panel software, this guide will focus on cPanel for Linux and Plesk for Windows. Both software suites are subscription based with monthly costs or annual costs. Plesk demo can be found here: http://www.plesk.com/#demo and cPanel demo can be found here: http://cpanel.com/demo/ cPanel also has WHM (Web Host Manager) Which includes their own integrated software to run and maintain your server. Each service has a detailed installation guide on their respective websites.
Billing Software
A good, fluid, and easy-to-use billing system is an absolute must for a beginning web host. An automated billing system like WHMCS (http://www.whmcs.com) will include account management, domain management, and support ticketing features critical to the success of your hosting business. WHMCS has support for both Windows and Linux operating systems, and detailed instructions for installation can be found on their product support pages: http://docs.whmcs.com/Getting_Started.
What Products And Services To Provide
Now that you’ve decided which route to go with your new hosting company, it’s time to explore the wide variety of services hosting companies offer. We’ll take a look at 4 different services you can provide: 1. Shared Hosting 2. Cloud Hosting 3. Virtual Private Server (VPS) 4. Dedicated Server
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the idea of hosting multiple websites on one server. It remains the most cost-effective and popular hosting option. By placing up to 2500 websites on a blade server, the web host is able to distribute the cost of running that server across all of those users. This allows webhosts to charge very low fees per month, sometimes as low as $0.99/month, and still remain profitable. A shared hosting service will distribute storage space and bandwidth among users sharing a server and have system administration for maintenance and daily upkeep. Shared hosting is the most basic form of hosting, where you as a webhost will provide and install all the server and end-user software. All the user has to do is pay the monthly fee and access your cPanel (or Plesk for Windows Server) to upload your website. Often a shared service will have a number of benefits aimed at the technically unskilled user, such as auto installers for WordPress, drag and drop website builders, and basic technical support.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting services provide hosting for websites on virtual servers, meaning they draw data and computing resources from a vast network of physical servers located around the world. Like shared hosting, cloud hosting houses multiple websites on one server (or virtual server). This allows customers to pay for the bandwidth and storage they use. Cloud hosting exists as an alternative to hosting websites on a single server (either dedicated or shared server), it is part of the cluster hosting concept where websites are hosted on multiple servers. The network of servers used with cloud hosting is vast and drawn from tens of different data centers around the world. Like shared hosting, cloud hosting is usually aimed at the non-technical end user, and as a result, the hosting company will provide easy-to-use software and support.
VPS Hosting
A virtual private server is a virtual machine that has its own OS installation. This allows the user to control every aspect of hosting except the hardware – much more freedom than shared hosting. For example, your customer can install any software with a VPS hosting package. VPS are functionally equivalent to a dedicated server, and they can be created and configured very easily due to their software-based nature. A VPS is created by dividing a server into multiple virtual servers. This makes a VPS significantly cheaper to operate than a dedicated server, and you can pass the savings on to the customer. VPS comes as managed and unmanaged. In an unmanaged VPS, the customer is given access to the system and then left to his own devices, whereas a managed VPS will be accessed in the same way as a shared hosting package – through the control panel.
Dedicated Server
A dedicated server is an entire server that is rented to a client for the purpose of web hosting. Users and organizations using dedicated servers have full control over the server, including the choice of operating system, hardware, and software. Like a VPS, the webhost has the option to manage the server instead of allowing the customer to do so. A dedicated server benefits from increased independence and stability, and is typically used for websites with high amounts of traffic.
A Quick Look At Customer Support And Service
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of hosting is excellent support and service. In a saturated market there is nothing that can differentiate your business from thousands of others on the Internet. Often the best marketing is word-of-mouth advertising, and this can only come from hundreds of satisfied customers.
Customer service starts from the moment a potential customer visits your website. Support should be available as a free call or live chat with the click of a button. You should be prepared to spend many hours making your website user-friendly and making your checkout process streamlined and secure. Once the customer has registered for the hosting package, it is a good idea to send an email detailing the registration details, payment information, set-up information and setup support email + phone.
The customer may call two or three times in the first few months of service, and your support staff should be ready to answer any questions they have. Speaking of assurance, most hosting companies will have a 30-90 day money-back guarantee – and your business should too. Be prepared to lose a large portion of customers after the first 30 days; This is common even for the best web hosts. With any luck, the customers who remain will remain loyal to your business for years to come.
Read Also:
- How to Start a Web Hosting Company
- Top and Most 105 Important Topics Related To Web Hosting
- Cheapest Web Hosting Sites
- Best Sites for Free Web Hosting
- Web Hosting(With Definition,Uses,and How does it Works)
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