[danielr06]

I am seeking to start a web hosting company. How can I reach my customer? Is face to face preferred since I will be such a small player in web hosting??

daniel
daniel@triplecrownweb.com

[Pangea]

Get out into the field! Research! Research! Research!

Personally, I think the best way to advertise your company would be to go to all the web designers in the world and offer them a discount if they design websites and host them with you!

I would!

I am a webdesigner (www.paulbeaumont.co.nr) and am always looking out for a new cheaper web package.

[gambit]

Why not both?

[joviyach]

How far along are you in this business plan?

[pentupentropy]

I don't want in any way to dissuade you. I wish you the best of luck, but what are you doing? Web hosting is not as easily a generic term as it used to be. Most companies are niche markets now... shared hosting, dedicated, colos, streaming media, application hosting, windows, LAMP, cpanel, etc, etc. Pick a niche. I hate to say it, but I'm never happy with ahost for long, I just can't afford $1200/mo for no good reason for my own colo plus tens of thousands for my own equipment.

I think I may have recommended this a lo9ng time ago, but rackspace.com was going to look into this and never did mostly due (I think) to vendor contracts. What the world could use is a clustered hosting environment. So many companies (small ones) could use this. When I host with a small account, I usually get limited to x amount of MySQL connections at once (5-10) or so many instances of apache or x amount of RAM.

at rack4less.com, you could get a rack for 1200/mo with a 25 MB/s connection. Add to that a 3x load balanceds set of killer web servers (say, dual P4 3.06's, 2 GB RAM and RAID 1 (mirrored) 250 GB SATA's - maybe 4 to increase capacity) and a slamming clustered MySQL database, you could attract a lot of small companies who need an affordable solution but can't afford that all on their own (like me). Instead of trying to build 1000's of $10 month mini hosts or 100's of unreliable dedicated customers after having spent millions, you'd be in the middle, where you would be able to charge $100-$500 month for shared hosting. At an average of $200/client, you would need about 10 clients to pay your own hosting bills.

...just a thought =)

[G_C]

Start posting on forums - there are plenty of them out there where people discuss all things related to online activities and e-commerce. Such people tend to have websites, and websites tend to need hosting. That's exactly how I found out about the hosting company I work with at the moment - they were running a promotion campaign on a forum that I'm a regular member of. Forum advertising also gives you an added advantage of customer feedback - if your service is good, then forum users will often be happy to post their positive feedback, meaning that the rest of the community will see that there's some genuine praising coming from people whom they know and respect. Finally, forum posting (in most cases) is free, so you won't be spending any money on such a promotional campaign.

[niyogi]

I would suggest starting with a reseller hosting account (preferably one that features end-user support) and then upgrade as necessary! When you are larger, move into a dedicated server and then maybe two or more!

Roj

[derekmajor]

Originally Posted by pentupentropy

I don't want in any way to dissuade you. I wish you the best of luck, but what are you doing? Web hosting is not as easily a generic term as it used to be. Most companies are niche markets now... shared hosting, dedicated, colos, streaming media, application hosting, windows, LAMP, cpanel, etc, etc. Pick a niche. I hate to say it, but I'm never happy with ahost for long, I just can't afford $1200/mo for no good reason for my own colo plus tens of thousands for my own equipment.

I think I may have recommended this a lo9ng time ago, but rackspace.com was going to look into this and never did mostly due (I think) to vendor contracts. What the world could use is a clustered hosting environment. So many companies (small ones) could use this. When I host with a small account, I usually get limited to x amount of MySQL connections at once (5-10) or so many instances of apache or x amount of RAM.

at rack4less.com, you could get a rack for 1200/mo with a 25 MB/s connection. Add to that a 3x load balanceds set of killer web servers (say, dual P4 3.06's, 2 GB RAM and RAID 1 (mirrored) 250 GB SATA's - maybe 4 to increase capacity) and a slamming clustered MySQL database, you could attract a lot of small companies who need an affordable solution but can't afford that all on their own (like me). Instead of trying to build 1000's of $10 month mini hosts or 100's of unreliable dedicated customers after having spent millions, you'd be in the middle, where you would be able to charge $100-$500 month for shared hosting. At an average of $200/client, you would need about 10 clients to pay your own hosting bills.

...just a thought =)

I will disagree with everything you said except for the niche market. I used to run a very successful web hosting business prior to selling it. The biggest market I found was locally. People in the same city you live in love the fact they can work with someone local. Try finding people in your city and offering them services that way. They will appreciate the fact you're in the same city\town, now all you have to do is close them in with great customer service and prices.

Cheers,
Derek

[niyogi]

I'm with Derek on the disagreement except niche market!

Roj

[pentupentropy]

Constructive debate: good, however, derek, you're saying you had a successful hosting company. Can you define successful? My discussion was to stress that to make a company grow and be successful at an enterprise level, most markets with a demographic large enough to support that kind of venture are not only saturated but declining due to all of the basement webhosting companies.

In fact, maybe it's time people stop thinking about web hosting and start thinking what else is involved. I interviewed recently with http://www.ip-soft.net, a company down on state street that helps their clients find not only the hosting services they need, but the service level agreements with that company, themselves or an outside contractor to take care of extremely customized SLA's.

The bottom line is that unless you've found some amazing marketing machine, you're not going to get your worth back out of it. When I worked at Globix, our cost per acquisition for clients was phenominal. In the $1000's for each new client. Even if it were $100.00 each, how much money are you going to make at $5-20.00 per month?

I'd be happy to agree with you if you could show me case studies, a market analysis or any supporting evidence that says you had a cheap CPA or high yeild ROI on any shared hosting scenario. I'd be happy to think it exists, but the chances are slim and none.

If you had your own dedicated server for $125/mo and could fit 250 clients on it, that would be $25K just to get it filled up and you're making roughly $3-5K per month on it. If you're talking about spending that kind of marketing and advertising capital, you're better off going with something that has a much higher potential return.

www.ip-soft.net

[Milas Media]

Thats true,
I own my own co-located server and currently host 148 customers. The hosting business is very cutthroat online via search engines. You must diversify your marketing tactics. What I have done, since I started this business, is to market locally, 16 new hosting customers in Dec 05 marketing localy, and offering them something that they haven't been offered, which I do not wish to share. The hosting game is not about "who is the cheapest", its truly about sales and good customer contact. If you keep a customer happy and give them what they desire or need or both (which is the best), it will be unlikely for them to look anywhere else for the same services.