Thread: Is it worth trying to get into webhosting now days?

I've always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to get into it but never really did other than maybe hosting a few sites for family or what not and it was all manually setup and managed.

But I'm thinking of revisiting it as with inflation and overall cost of living my day job is just not enough and having a bit of extra money coming in on the side could be nice. I would write a custom control panel and setup an environment where everything is mostly automated and I just need to monitor it, tend to support tickets etc.

Question is, is it even worth trying to get into this now days? Especially with things like cloud pretty much taking over, and the fact that less people even make websites now days, lot of organizations just have FB pages and other social media presence.

My goal would be to provide a fairly basic LAMP hosting environment, nothing super crazy, is there even still a market for this? I would make sure to implement some basic level of redundancy/failover, backups etc and all the basic stuff one would expect from a web host to try to meet the 5 nines.

My dream would be to run my own mini data centre and have full physical access to the hardware so I can setup a more advanced environment but that's getting way ahead of myself. At first I would be renting a couple dedicated servers to run stuff and then go from there.

You can be successful by imitating popular companies. Customers need friendly, effective and better support than big companies could not provide in these days. Also you can try to offer better optimized plans with affordable prices. I believe these can be increase your sales and worth it. Good luck!

There's a hosting company poping up and going broke or scamming people every day. I would stay away from web hosting, or VM hosting.

The market for basic LAMP hosting is still there, but it’s more competitive due to cloud services offering easier scalability and management. If you target niche markets and offer great support, it could still work, but it’ll require a lot of effort to stand out.

Don't make it your full time job. Until you are over 300K. Also, learn marketing.

Try working at a data center and then go out on your own on the side.

Originally Posted by redrooster

Try working at a data center and then go out on your own on the side.

ouch! DC grunt work is the worst.

Evening,

Allow me to offer my experiences. I started hosting back in 99 when I taught HTML 101 and then PHP 101. It made sense for me to start my own little "company" for my students. So I grabbed a reseller account and went off to the races. Little did I know it would become successfull. However the success was based highly on the market we were in, the success of my students needed space for their small startups *remember this was 99/2000 so PHP was just hitting version 5.0. So with that we got ourselves our first server, installed cPanel on it, and upgraded to PHP 5. We SEO'd the daylights out of this and managed to get to number 1 on Google for PHP 5 Hosting. Now again this was back in 99/2000 so SEO was much different. Either way. Moving forward we added more servers, and them more servers as we added VPS's to the mix, then even more servers as we started to offer dedicated servers to the mix. Now we were up to several rented racks out in Vegas @ Fiberhub as I lived in Vegas. Moving along a few years for this growth.

Along comes the next huge move. Our on DC, but where, I mean this is one heck of an investment, so we researched and found a partner that wanted to move into Mexico so needless to say $3,000,000 later we had our own building, power, servers, all that. Was one heck of a learning adventure.

However with all that, we used out of the box solutions. Example cPanel for all our shared hosting servers. SolusVM for our VPS nodes. WHMCS for the billing panel. We did not write a single custom piece of code. Well some but you get the reference. We made it so that clients were not tied to us, meaning that should we not provide the best service they could leave and go to another provider without problems; or we could fire a client too, this is a real thing.

Now with some of this, and here comes my two cents.

• Do not custom write any sort of panel. There are already huge players in the field don't reinvent the wheel. DirectAdmin is what $29 a month for unlimited accounts. You can't code a panel for that kind of price point.
• Same with a standard billing/support panel. There are several options, WHMCS, Blesta, ClientExec are the big ones. Heck fire, get a reseller account with some good resellers here and you can get the above mentioned panels included for your use for a very affordable price.
• Start with a reseller account. Example NameCrane.com Love these guys. I have been working with the owner directly now for over ten years. ** Never pulled that card :-) However he is a good man. This way as you grow you can expand until you want your own VPS -> Dedicated -> Dedicateds -> Colo -> You get the rest.
• Have at least 1 years expenses set aside for this. Last thing you want to do is start to get a client(s) and then have to shut down because what your charging them won't cover the bills.
• Don't try and compete on cost, you wil loose. Everybody has hosting for $1 what makes you any better? Create a niche and stick to it. No matter if its a solution you sell, a service, make yourself stand out in the massive crowd that is the internet.

I don't want to kick you or anything, but please make sure you have your ducks all in a row before you do anything but buy domain names. If you tell anybody a name, own that domain name. :-)


Thanks,
Anthony

Originally Posted by RubyRingTech

Evening,

Allow me to offer my experiences. I started hosting back in 99 when I taught HTML 101 and then PHP 101. It made sense for me to start my own little "company" for my students. So I grabbed a reseller account and went off to the races. Little did I know it would become successfull. However the success was based highly on the market we were in, the success of my students needed space for their small startups *remember this was 99/2000 so PHP was just hitting version 5.0. So with that we got ourselves our first server, installed cPanel on it, and upgraded to PHP 5. We SEO'd the daylights out of this and managed to get to number 1 on Google for PHP 5 Hosting. Now again this was back in 99/2000 so SEO was much different. Either way. Moving forward we added more servers, and them more servers as we added VPS's to the mix, then even more servers as we started to offer dedicated servers to the mix. Now we were up to several rented racks out in Vegas @ Fiberhub as I lived in Vegas. Moving along a few years for this growth.

Along comes the next huge move. Our on DC, but where, I mean this is one heck of an investment, so we researched and found a partner that wanted to move into Mexico so needless to say $3,000,000 later we had our own building, power, servers, all that. Was one heck of a learning adventure.

Anthony

That was an interesting read.

When did you eventually sell the business?

I'd have to agree with your comments about not putting resources into reinventin-the-wheel by creating a custom panel and starting with a reseller account.

You make me feel nostalgic with the talk about SEO. I used to have it down very good back when I ran a small tech site in the early 2000's. I was #1 result on Google for very basic things like the name of certain Windows system files. And for whatever reason, turing. Had so many people sign up on my forum asking for turing advice. But yeah SEO is very different now. I have not kept up.

I know my way around managing a server, so I would want a bit more control than a reseller account as I feel that's kind of cookie cutter. Like why would someone want to buy from someone just reselling when they can just go direct to the source. I've been meaning to code my own control panel for my own personal sites/server setup anyway, as right now I manage everything manually be editing config files, and it would be nice to automate it more. So I would just extend it to creating a multi user hosting environment. I imagine for stuff like cpanel etc you're paying a license per server per month, so that adds up. Although I might just start off with that and see how it goes. Lot of dedicated server providers offer cpanel out of the box.

The billing would be the hard part though, especially sales tax. I really don't know how to go about managing that, it's lot of complexity due to all the different jurisdictions, especially if I offer services outside of Canada. The US for example has 10's of thousands of different tax jurisdictions as they even have county taxes and think some even have municipal taxes. How does one even begin to manage all that? Are there ways to automate all of that? Would buying a premade billing system handle all that for me?

And yeah competing on cost seems futile, I would want to see what I can offer that the super cheap plans don't. I may actually sign up for some of the cheap ones just so I can get an idea of what they can and can't do. Ex: uptime, performance, and so on and make sure I can 1 up that.

Afternoon,
You are truly farther then many that you know how to manage a server. You are very correct license costs add up, however those license costs do provide a certain level of trust from customers, assuming your going to target the masses. If your not and you want to target your local community and knock on doors then maybe the custom solution will work out. Heck fire, sFTP and a Caddy, MySQL, PHP setup and you can provide a very nice setup for people, that will provide SSL and more, or even Webmin which is a control panel, but it does alot of the automation for you, so it might be a good set of scripts to test or look at and break down??

As far as billing, and I am not a tax lawyer but doing business here in the US, we charged say $4.95/Month which included the taxes. We ended up paying Local, State, and Federal taxes. We did not have to pay taxes in each state, and country we had clients in.

By no means do I want to tell you no don't do this, but like you said you need to bring something to the table that isn't here yet.

Just my 2 cents.
Thank you,
Anthony

Oh that's good to know about the sales taxes, so you only have to charge your own jurisdiction taxes then? That makes things way easier. For retail sales you do have to charge for each jurisdiction buyers are from don't you? I guess for hosting it's different?

Morning,
I advise you to speak with your accountant on that one, but at least down here no we did not have to pay taxes on our overseas clients, as they were doing business here in the US, not us doing business there. Please again I was the geek, not the accountant. :-) Maybe someone else can chime in here on that one.

Thanks!
Anthony

@ZenHosting Thank you, yeah it was a wild ride, learned a ton of things about what to do, and what not to do., where to "cut" costs and where not to. *read hiring the right electrician, and trusting the fiber drops where inplace before I flew 8 hours down there. We sold what 10 years ago? Won't lie wish I didn't but was in a very different mindset back then.

Fun times.
Now to dig up some old photos.

Thanks,
Anthony

It would definitely be interesting to hear more into what goes into a DC build, especially on getting internet connectivity, IP space, etc. I would love to turn my existing home server room into a mini DC to host my own stuff instead of paying for a leased server or even buy a building to build one, but no ISP here allows servers or even provides static IPs, so just that front alone is most likely a show stopper, unless there is a way I'm not considering to get such connectivity. But if I could do that, it would be a fun thing to get into, maybe even do colo, as there's nothing here for that so I'd be the only game for 100's of km for someone that wants to colo a server without having to go as far as Toronto, and most of those companies don't even show pricing or much info on how to be a customer, I think they only target very large companies. Lack of ISPs that provide that type of connectivity is probably why there are no colos here though... I would probably need to start an ISP first then lease dark fibre going all the way to Front Street in Toronto and essentially be my own provider to get the type of network connection I need to host stuff. I will not make enough money in my life time to afford that. But it's a fun dream.

If I do go with the custom control panel route I will implement high availability directly into it, so I will stick with individual leased servers across a few data centres and just lease more as I grow and if one fails the sites can be activated on another server. Either way I've been wanting to code this for my own use for my own sites, so I just figured I may as well build it in a way that it could be used for hosting too.

I still think it pays to get "under the hood" by working at a modern data center or within their corp for a while just to again familiarize yourself with the industry, its niches, the updated technology. You can meet engineers, staff, meet their already vetted vendors, other important people you can bounce ideas off of. If not, I think your only choice is to find a VERY small specific niche and attempt to dominate it. That will keep your competition to a minimum while you build from scratch, and make marketing easier. I know that within our own company, we have a lot of banking and HSP or ISP customers. Our CEO spends hours on the phone talking to those customers all day.. One refers another. By the way, nice profile name, from a rooster to a squirrel!

There are no data centres here. At least not any public ones, or any that are hiring. If there were I would probably colocate my stuff there and call it a day. I've done IT/server work in the past but it doesn't pay that much around here. I currently have a NOC job and it's super cushy and pays well so not jumping ship any time soon. Although I sometimes miss the hands on work of being in IT. The closest thing I get is my home server room.

Just start small, 1U server with the hypervisor of your preference, then setup 2 vps, one with your billing/management/webpage and another with your whm/cpanel for clients, replicate that to your home/remote backups. How far you are from any datacenter? First step its to get some quotes about 1u colocations, ips, bandwith and most important "ddos protection".

Yeah I have a nice setup at home already for my personal stuff. I wish I could just get a "datacentre" connection here and host right from home, at least until I grow bigger then could get a dedicated building. It's easier when you have physical access to the hardware to do a more advanced setup.

For now though I think I'll focus on regular shared hosting and just do it on a dedicated servers at OVH and similar providers to split things up, if I get to a point where I have money coming in then I can try to look at better options where I have a bit more control over the hardware setup, so I can do a cluster with HA.

I'm at least 8 hours away from any data centre so it's quite a drive just to get to one and the ones I found don't provide any pricing or any real details on how to become a client, seems they're only targeting huge companies and not individuals. They're all in the GTA it seems.

Focus local. I cannot stress this enough. I became profitable in my web hosting part of my business (software developer) in very little time doing this. Then provide quality service and word of mouth works wonders. I've never actually advertised my hosting either except suggesting it as an option to clients who want web apps developed/maintained.

Was thinking the same thing, start local first. I see so many businesses that don't even have a website at all anymore making it very hard to even get an idea of what products they sell, so I will approach them and offer them hosting and a website and go from there. I'll probably offer different tiers of service like just regular old fashioned hosting where you manage everything yourself, all the way to fully managed hosting where I build and take care of the website, domain registration etc too.

I've been kind of brainstorming how to setup the infrastructure and such and once I have a decent setup and I've put it through some good testing I'll start offering the services.

Originally Posted by Red Squirrel

Was thinking the same thing, start local first. I see so many businesses that don't even have a website at all anymore making it very hard to even get an idea of what products they sell, so I will approach them and offer them hosting and a website and go from there. I'll probably offer different tiers of service like just regular old fashioned hosting where you manage everything yourself, all the way to fully managed hosting where I build and take care of the website, domain registration etc too.

I've been kind of brainstorming how to setup the infrastructure and such and once I have a decent setup and I've put it through some good testing I'll start offering the services.

Start with a reseller is the easiest way via a reliable provider (cheaper isn't always best, ideally located in your region for better speeds). I've done sysadmin work for years so I went straight onto a VPS as it was suitable for my purposes (I loathe dealing with support who make me have to basically beg for tweaks for what I'm running).

You'll need to come up with a proposal that'll appeal to them and show examples of previous work so they can see if your skills are a good match for them. These days, everything I get is word of mouth. I never advertise. When you get to this stage, you can pick and choose what you want to do, it's a good place to be at.

Good luck!

Originally Posted by Red Squirrel

Was thinking the same thing, start local first. I see so many businesses that don't even have a website at all anymore making it very hard to even get an idea of what products they sell, so I will approach them and offer them hosting and a website and go from there. I'll probably offer different tiers of service like just regular old fashioned hosting where you manage everything yourself, all the way to fully managed hosting where I build and take care of the website, domain registration etc too.

I've been kind of brainstorming how to setup the infrastructure and such and once I have a decent setup and I've put it through some good testing I'll start offering the services.

Start with a business plan first.

Hosting takes time before you can see real profits.

I already have a dedicated server with my own personal stuff on it, so will probably start off with that but in a separate VM. Once I'm making enough money that it covers the monthly cost of server rental I'll get another. Probably keep doing that until I have 3 or so servers and at least one in a different DC so I feel comfortable as far as redundancy/fail over goes. Still have lot of stuff to design and think about before I actually get into it though as my goal is to build a system that will more or less be fully automated and be setup so it's super easy to spin up new boxes. And yeah maybe registering as an actual business and having a business plan would be a good idea too. That's something I'll have to research more on, never did a business plan before. Did run a small business many moons ago though, it was not really super big so didn't involve a business plan but I remember reading on it.

Sounds cliche at this point, but you can find someone on Upwork to assist with a business plan, or use ChatGPT for a basic plan.