Transitioning from Hobby To Business Income

deadpool

Alright so I own a little hosting gig as a hobby. I think we all have the dream of making it big and being our own boss and so I wanted to ask providers here preferably those who have built a business out of a hobby how they did it.

The dilemma that I'm facing is I'm a one man band and if I really start to drive in customers while trying to maintain a steady source of income, I feel I could jeopardize the overall picture by not always being available for support requests. How does a start up overcome that?

Second question is, at what point did it click for you providers that it was time to focus 100% on the business and dump the day job?

FlamesRunner

It's going to be a fun, fun April.

MikeA

@caniac22 said:
I feel I could jeopardize the overall picture by not always being available for support requests. How does a start up overcome that?

Second question is, at what point did it click for you providers that it was time to focus 100% on the business and dump the day job?

Even with hundreds of clients you can still work a normal job, unless your services are based around support or management.

deank

If you want to run it as a hobby or a side project, do make sure you state so on your website. Don't go out lying like you are "the fastest growing" / "number 1" shit.

And you aren't likely going to turn it as a full time job.

YokedEgg

Well, the hard thing about hosting is you have no other option but to meet the market at a set price.

People can look up the exact costs of the gear your slicing out for them for something like webhosting, vps, or a dedi. They can do the costs of the bandwidth, electricity, etc, etc roughly in their head and see a real time value of worth.

A better market to enter could perhaps be something like software, where you can control the perceived value a bit better.

Or, change the perceived value of hosting by doing something out of the box such as managed services.

This is one of the easier ways to thrive I think.

The race to the bottom is about the easiest way to die. You have to be able to control your perceived value on your own standards, but deliver enough to backup that perceived value.

pike

@YokedEgg said:
People can look up the exact costs of the gear your slicing out for them for something like webhosting, vps, or a dedi. They can do the costs of the bandwidth, electricity, etc, etc roughly in their head and see a real time value of worth.

Well I'm hosting some non profit organisations (political stuff), where none of the representatives has a clue about webhosting and most of them pay arround 20€/month for 1&1 webhosting before they become clients of me. So, basically I want to say not every client is able or willing to do the research, they just want to get this done by a person they know instead of a big company.

Mr_Tom

Yeah, often people just want to pay someone to do it and not have to worry. Those who are doing it themselves will often try and compare prices, but then I guess that's where the move to "managed" hosting comes in.

I've seen dedicated servers range from low (£15/month) upwards with no upper limit, but other than hardware quality the only thing that changes is level of support.

Any websites I host are all managed. Depending on the hosting you do you should still be able to work around it as well to help pay.

WHT

If you do not earn 2-3k month do not quit your job.

subhojitdutta

@pike said:

@YokedEgg said:
People can look up the exact costs of the gear your slicing out for them for something like webhosting, vps, or a dedi. They can do the costs of the bandwidth, electricity, etc, etc roughly in their head and see a real time value of worth.

Well I'm hosting some non profit organisations (political stuff), where none of the representatives has a clue about webhosting and most of them pay arround 20€/month for 1&1 webhosting before they become clients of me. So, basically I want to say not every client is able or willing to do the research, they just want to get this done by a person they know instead of a big company.

Amen to that! I Personally am a managed hosting provider in India and don't earn much from the hardware as in India(compared to US and EU), hardware and bandwidth is extremely expensive. All I do earn from is the managed service I provide to reduce infrastructure and network design cost and making sure their setup is available all the time by reducing multiple points of failure and maintaining the setup. This is all down to the fact that in India, most of the people expect maximum RoI and prefer to keep someone they know to manage their stuff and know that too big a company will always have worse support and/or will not provide a personal touch.

deank

I'd say LET market is about 25% of the whole. At the same time, it's the most easily accessible market to dive into and, well, go kaboom later.

Higher end market isn't as easy to get into because you need fund for advertising and need to build reputation.

Building up a local client base would be the start but, given how lazy low end hots have become nowadays, that's even a mighty challenge now.

YokedEgg

@Zen said:

YokedEgg said: Well, the hard thing about hosting is you have no other option but to meet the market at a set price.

People can look up the exact costs of the gear your slicing out for them for something like webhosting, vps, or a dedi. They can do the costs of the bandwidth, electricity, etc, etc roughly in their head and see a real time value of worth.

A better market to enter could perhaps be something like software, where you can control the perceived value a bit better.

Or, change the perceived value of hosting by doing something out of the box such as managed services.

This is one of the easier ways to thrive I think.

The race to the bottom is about the easiest way to die. You have to be able to control your perceived value on your own standards, but deliver enough to backup that perceived value.

I don't agree with this, if you are targeting people that are comparing offers to that degree, then you are already set to lose (which is why LET/LEB is a generally terrible market to target). There are wildly varying audiences, you cannot generalize the entire market like that.

Even if the whole market was like that, and that line of thinking was valid, you're still leaving out things like employee salaries and expertise which you will never have access to (so your comparisons will be invalid). There's a big difference between a provider based out of London with physical employees, and a provider utilizing the same DC but with remote employees from Eastern Europe.

Edit: to clarify, "meet the market at a set price" is a terrible mindset. If you really want to be successful, you find/make the market, that's what allows you to set your own price. There's a space for everyone, the challenge is finding it.

I'm glad you could restate my same point while slightly changing it and then saying you disagree with my point.

In regards to the edit, I hate to break this to you but you cannot beat the most simple law of economics, which is supply and demand.

Hxxx

NO .

deank

WHY NOT. This one has good potential to be good drama. Don't let it die.

YokedEgg

@Zen said:

YokedEgg said: I'm glad you could restate my same point while slightly changing it and then saying you disagree with my point.

Your opening sentence is the only one that matters, the rest of your post does not add any value. Although, you do contradict yourself later in the post. It was my mistake for quoting your entire post, rather than your opening sentence (fixed now) - which is what I was replying to at first.

YokedEgg said: In regards to the edit, I hate to break this to you but you cannot beat the most simple law of economics, which is supply and demand.

Supply and demand does not contradict the point made in my edit.

Issa no from me dawg.