How to Open the Web Hosting Business

If your business turns round web development, hosting providing for clients will be logical additional service. It we kill two birds with one stone: you will have small additional income and less problems with crookedly customised clients' hosting. You will always customise the server so that your programs worked on it without problems. So, what is necessary to know and and to be able to do in order to open your own web hosting business?

1. A server

To begin with one dedicated server will be enough. It is up to you what to choose -- Unix or Windows. If you need both ASP and PHP support, you will choose Windows.

It is necessary to choose a reliable provider with a good reputation. When the number of clients on a server reaches some critical value (100-250 clients, it depends on many parametres), take one more server etc. If you have some providers in view, subscribe for their mailing list. They may have interesting sales offers.

2. A control panel

All charm of a web hosting consists of a control panel such as Plesk, Helm or DirectAdmin. The panel makes manager's life easier, hiding from him/her the majority of unnecessary details. Besides it gives the interface for concrete users where they can customise FTP, email, protect directories with a password etc.

3. Billing

Billing system is needed to take money from clients on a regular basis.

4. Back-ups and redundancy

You can not allow yourself to lose the clients' data. There are some strategies which give the best results when they come with certain combination.

Using RAID the controller it is possible to protect yourself from hard disk breakage. Two disks will hardly fail simultaneously. From physical destruction of the data, for example in case of fire or as a result of virus operations automatic backups will rescue.

5. A web site

Everything is simple here. Just find an approaching template on OSWD and make it better.

6. Payment acceptance

Accept payments by all ways accessible to your clients. Do not forget to convince that your billing-system supports all these ways of payment.

7. Technical support of users

Give a hosting only to those who have already bought one of your programs. Thus you will have several clients and they will be loyal. Questions about hosting are given to the main queue of the technical support and are responded as well as other questions.

If you conceive web a hosting as independent business, it is necessary to approach to a question of the technical support more seriously. Most of web hosting clients expect an answer and solution of their problem within several minutes or hours, 24Ñ…7.

8. Promotion

It is very difficult to promote a hosting company nowadays, the competition is great. But everything is possible with a good SEO specialist.

Have a try and good luck.