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Comments
is it the from Heymman's promo dedicated server ?
They give a free /24 aswell
what a crazy deal
E7 makes me thing of cloudatcost shitty stuff. Are they perhaps based in the same location, and is op trying to resell them?
You can buy old E7's cheap but thats a lot of clients to shove on a single box.
As for asia optimized? From Chicago?
Francisco
Step 1: Borrow $10,000
Step 2: Buy hardware
Step 3: Plan
That classic from 2011?
I'm going to throw you a bone here because (a) you haven't been thin-skinned, (b) you seem sincere and can at least borrow $10K, and (c) we've had too far too many venture-capital giants bandied about here, to say nothing of mutant-hosters-from-birth (e.g., @Francisco). We haven't had a good truly garage hoster here in a while.
But here's the thing...LEB/LET is a horrible place to build a business around. As part of the business, sure, but your business plan should have LET as an after thought. And WHT must be an afterthought because it's so noisy you'll never be noticed. So...what's your plan outside of a WHT classified and the provider tag on LET?
There have been threads here, WHT, and vpsboard with titles like "if you had 50,000 to start a hosting company, what would you do with it". I noticed the younger/wannabe hosters talk about hardware, and the older, more experience hosters talk about marketing and customer acquisition.
You need to define:
(1) what differentiates you? at the moment, the answer is "nothing". This is a really hard question but it's the most important one. Yeah, sure, you can look at BuyVM or Ramnode and say "nothing really differentiates them" but they have experience, size, and reputation, which you don't. How will you stand out from everyone else who bought the same ThemeForest template?
(2) who is your customer?
(3) how will you reach him in a cost-effective way?
(4) using different assumptions (poor response, good response, etc.) how does the next 12 months model out in terms of costs, revenue, etc.? Don't forget the sales cycle and chargebacks. Or advertising. Or spare parts for that server. Or what you need to pay the guy who lent you $10K. Or blow for the LET mods.
This is business plan 101.
You get full 4U+ power eating beasts on ebay for a grand or two.
Francisco
@raindog308 I personally believe that you could have a shite product but as long as you have good marketing people will buy it, its all about how you handle sales and how you market your product, especially if that product is in no way unique.
Really great advice! I sincerely thank you for your time and effort sharing this with me.
A little background from where the 10k funding came from. Me and my cousin are Helpdesk Engineers for a tiny IT support company for the past 6years. Our jobs are to provide infrastructure support(Networks, Virtualization & Wintel) to the clients. And trust me we are really low paid labours sitting infront of our workstation for 12hours a day. One day over lunch we talked and decided to startup something that could make use of our knowledge and experience. Fast forward, both of us went to the bank with all we had to get a loan, and $10k was approved. And here i am today
Well, i understand that this is quite a saturated market. Firstly, i plan to start of my brand buy selling VPS at really low price without any profits for maybe a year? With this we are hoping to gain reputation and confidence from customers. During the first year, things are ran pretty simple, KVM + SolusVm + WHMCS, and at the same time we will innovate and build different products(Onapp Cloud/CloudStack/Dedicated Server Offering) and offering different locations. With our current reputation, there is no way we can go out competing with those reputable company in the mass market and we dont have much fund for real marketing or branding. LET is really a good platform for us to start from ground up.
In life, everyone has to take a step and start somewhere, dont you agree?
We've seen the same story many times and it's simply too much mental burn to deal with.
There's no guarantee you'll gain reputation either. What happens after the first year when you want it bring up costs some to make things profitable? No ones going to bite because they know if they really want something from you, you're willing to go lower.
The usual rule of thumb is to have 1 year of savings in the bank to support yourself if needed, not to intentionally starve in hopes of a big meal at the end.
Francisco
Although I crapped on you before- I'm being completely serious here:
You're going from the pan and into the fire. You've gone from direct service and support into a myriad of "Everyone with a credit card and half a clue has tried this". I think you should expand your other business- locally and possibly remote. Getting trustworthy technical support for Wintel is difficult these days.
Do the needful. Be a success.
There are good places to start and bad places to start. You are picking a bad place.
If possible start with shared hosting and get some local customers. They might help you to reach break-even more quickly. The low end vps market is not a good place to begin with. Good luck and all the best.
Why should any one today starts a VPS business? The pricing is insane low. And even the large players are now cheap. So don't burn your money in this industry. It will not make you or the client happy. There are 1000000000 of VPS providers today. And even more Webhosting companies.
Maybe go for Plex hosting rather than just VPS?
Why not? But will need to invest in HDD nodes. My current SSD setup is too expensive for Plex
Yeah... forgot that you purchased SSDs...
Doesnt matter! Thats another area we can explore and expand by adding HDD nodes
Wait, what hardware did you get and how much did you pay for it? Purchases, rentals, or what? Are you planning to pay yourselves salaries with money left from the $10k after buying the hardware? This is getting crazier every minute.
Nope, we are not taking any salaries as we still have our Helpdesk jobs running. Over here even making an extra $100 a month is alot.
We are just starting something out of our interest and passion and hoping to make a little extra every month. If its grows big enough then we may consider expanding it full time.
What are the specs of that E7 server? You might do better renting it out as a dedi than messing with VPS's.
You will fail. One (of a lot of) reason: Law of scale. 10k$ will get you next to nothing in terms of servers as you also need infrastructure like switches, routers, etc. But even if you started by renting a fully infrastructured rack 10k$ won't let you play on a scale where you get attractive deals.
You will fail. The skill set you have as support guys is quite different from the skill set needed to build applications. And if you buy them you are me-too nobodies again.
Interesting.
Standout is the key. Browse about goodhosting.co and how he got customers from here.
And lost them when he went on vacation.
Why do you say this?
Our DDoS Protection is powered by Radware... the same appliance that large corporations, banks, PayPal, eBay etc use to protect their public facing infrastructure.
For those who require more complex DDoS protection solutions, we offer a "Always On" protection solution as per https://www.quadranet.com/vest-ddos-protection
He might be talking about protection in non LA locations, unless things have changed recently all filtering is done in LA?
A bit offtopic but did he ever show again?
This is not going to turn out well for the OP. Sad to say I have seen many people with a lot more experience and money still fail in this arena. With the knowledge you have this will not work and you will end up owing that 10 grand back.
You need coding and Linux Admin exp to make something like this work. The days of the hobbyist are sadly gone.
E7 will eat so much power you better of with something with low power if you will do Colocation somewhere.
My advice, don't go E7 go with a supermicro 3u blade system and some E3v5's or even E5, much better power wise
E7-4860 = 10 cores, Westmere architecture, 130 watt TDP, so over 500 watts just for the quad cpu's. I don't see a passmark score for that part but I'll guess 20k-25k if you're lucky, i.e. equivalent to maybe three cheap old E3's or two recent ones.
There are actually DC's in this world with cheap enough power that running that E7 is not completely insane, but who knows whether OP is near one.
Passmark has one for dual E7-4860's - https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E7-+4870+%40+2.40GHz&id=2021&cpuCount=2
Still low compared to single 10 core processors like the E5-2660 v2.