Have you ever thought about starting your own website hosting company? If you’ve ever taken a look at the kind of huge profits generated by the major providers like iPage and GoDaddy, it’s not too far a stretch of the imagination to envision yourself making plenty of money providing businesses with affordable, reliable hosting.
Sure, you’d like to do it, but doesn’t it seem impossible from the outset? You envision vast warehouses full of expensive, physical servers, the need for a degree in computer science to manage the whole thing, and ample reserves of cash to keep things going.
The good news is, you don’t really need an of those things. All you really need to start your own web hosting company is to buy a dedicated server for around $100, divvy it up into partitions, and sell those partitions on at a profit.
Simple, right? No? Here’s a few tips to help you get started.
Look for a dedicated reseller company
A good hosting review site will normally list the top plans and provide you with independent advice to help you make an informed decision about buying your dedicated server. Using one of these rather than going straight to the sales pages of hosting companies you find on Google does have plenty of benefits.
For one thing, you get real users’ opinions on the pros and cons of each reseller hosting plan, result in a much more unbiased verdict than your typical hosting company sales pitch. For another, you’ll often find that these review sites have access to discount coupons and vouchers the providers themselves don’t want you to know about, meaning you could ultimately end up buying your dedicated server for a lower cost than if you went to them directly.
Think realistically about what you can handle
It’s all well and good setting out to become the next GoDaddy or the biggest threat to HostGator’s success they’ve ever seen, but are you ready for the challenges that will inevitably lie ahead in doing so?
Think realistically about the kind of resources you have at your disposal. We’re not just talking about finances here. Time and effort plays a big part too. Though you may well have plans to expand once you start building a profit, when you first get started, you’re likely to be doing this solo, meaning the responsibility for attracting customers, setting up new accounts and keeping them happy in the long-run all falls down to you.
If that’s the case, be wary not to take on more than you realistically handle. Maybe start with a smaller dedicated server with enough resources to look after your first bunch of customers, but buy from a hosting provider who make upgrades easier, so you can always make your server grow as your business grows.
Know your niche
Competition among shared hosting providers is as -if not more- fierce than it is for perhaps any other industry, product or service. With that in mind, you’re going to have to think long and hard about what sets you apart from the crowd.
Remember, you don’t only have the web hosting giants to contend with, you’ve also got an abundance of smaller companies all pitching to the same set of customers. If you’re to stand a chance of success then, it pays to develop your own niche, finding a gap in the market that only you can cater for.
Keep on marketing
At the start of your journey towards starting a hosting company with a dedicated server, there’s a good chance you created some sort of marketing plan, even if it was only a few basic pointers scribbled on a scrap of paper.
Once you’ve got your business off the ground though, it pays to keep investing time in that marketing plan, constantly looking at what’s working for you, what isn’t, and adjusting accordingly in order to keep attracting new customers time and time again on your journey to rival the likes of GoDaddy.