So you want to join the ranks of the many web hosting company folks you’ve come to know through the years hanging out at Webhostingtalk.com. Don’t let this piece discourage you or crush your dreams. By all means follow through and get that business going. I just want to discuss a few elements worth thinking about regarding the web hosting business. Best of luck to you 🙂
- You will be held reliable for any problems – Any problems that can arise whether it be downtime not under your control or because clients are abusing the service, you will be held responsible for any problems that can occur.
- Time consuming support responses – Unless you have the staff to cater for all the support requests, then you’re going to be spending most of your time responding to them and while the majority of them might be simple fixes the others could be fairly time consuming. So if you’re not promoting your web hosting business you’re probably going to be working hard trying to get the back log of support requests down to a minimum – there’s never a dull moment running a web hosting business.
- Keeping your finances under control – You’re a new business so keeping your finances under control will be the most important part of running the business, you will definitely lose money the first year so it’s important to keep finances tight and keep the losses to a minimum – if you manage to survive for the first couple of years then there’s no reason why you can’t start making a profit.
- Advertising and promoting – There are a lot of ways you can promote your business, but this is even more time consuming and a lot more hard work is involved. The idea here is to get leads and convert them into paying customers, many Web Hosting Panels also allow clients to refer their friends and get good commission from doing so. There are other alternatives such as Google AdSense but you will need to test this as this method can work differently for everyone.
- Server management – Apart from all of the time consuming work above you’ll also need to manage the server and all of the client’s accounts. If you’re not installing a new product for your clients you’ll probably be problem solving or updating previous products.
