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I found this in the "Running a web hosting business" forum over at WebhostingTalk, but I felt it applies to most businesses in general so I am reposting it here.
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A few years can change a person and there perspective. Also, it can change how they view old posts and perspectives.
For those thinking of starting hosting companies or are currently running them, I have some advice and will explain it all towards the end.
1.) Don't take partners, don't work with partners. In the end it is not worth the headache and deteriment to yourself and your business it can cause.
2.) If you can't handle the support load yourself, hire a verifiable company, don't hire just anyone, and especially avoid people who already run hosting companies, no matter how small or big.
3.) Don't plan on it being a full time thing until it is. Make sure you have a secondary source of income.
4.) When buying other hosting companies make sure to use an attorney so you have recourse if things are far from what they say.
5.) Don't plan to build your entire company from WHT, use other sources including local and other places.
6.) If someone offers you help, listen to them.
Now, for those who know who I am you may understand some of this, which is why I am writing this. After reading a variety of things I just felt a need to make a statement that will explain a few things and hopefully help others.
1.) A company I ran which I took in partners on was seized from my control, yet I was the one that took all the greif over it even though all passwords were changed and all control was taken from me without my knowledge or consent. My only option would have been to shut everything down, instead I left things operational so the customers would stay up and was forced to walk away.
2.) In another company I hired an employee to do support whom I didn't monitor well enough. He subsequently stole customers and flipped us upside down on income. If I had a second income this probably wouldn't have been a big deal, but I didn't. Then further issues occured with statements made, etc... that caused more problems.
3.) Rather than finding something full time I dumped over a very large sum of money into creating a hosting company that would be full time, which was a mistake (not putting the money in, counting it as full time). Find a full-time job, start the hosting company, when it grows enough use it as a full-time job, but not until.
4.) We purchased a hosting company only to find out that the amount of customers stated was wrong, 25% were fraud, 20% were already cancelled, 55% had been billed 4 times in a row in the same month, etc... We had no recourse against this and laid out much more than we should have for the company, which will cause further detriment.
5.) If you build from WHT you die by WHT. There will always be users with problems, but as most people know WHT users are more vocal. The more Vocal your users are the less customers you will get from WHT and the more likely you are to lose customers you obtained from WHT.
6.) At one point the company that was providing servers was willing to offer us options, but I had already put myself into a position to be in a partnership. Make sure you listen to all optoins and all help before offered before you take up anyone on there offer.
Many of these lessons get learned the hardware, I hope I can help others avoid learning them the hard way.
As Bob Parsons says "Never Give Up" and "Don't take partners" he should also add "Learn from your lessons, and burn them into your mind".
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