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https://www.webbess.se/
I think @emgh is right. This is a very tough market, saturated as others have said, and you have to have a very good idea or unique offering. I'd also suggest you change your perspective and look for what can really distinguish you and set you apart. Best of luck with your adventures, I'm sure you'll learn something good from all this, though. Experience is the best teacher.
Plus you'd have the added bonus that they all sign up with VPNs and use fake info, so you can just cancel their service and then when they come here to create a new thread to moan about you, you can just shrug and say non of their payment types accept refunds.
Also, you should definitely look into your legal obligations as an Indian citizen. Most of the Indian providers are discovering the hard way that they need to take KYC seriously.
Nah. It's:
Get job at company doing what you want
Get trained and paid to do it
Realize you can do it better for cheaper and start your own business
Having a unique idea isn't required. Some of the most wealthy people I know just do regular, nothing special businesses but just run them well.
You're not wrong in general, but you're wrong if you think this is the way in the hosting market.
In the hosting market, it's what I said.
Or great contacts, as I also said.
What? You can't say that's the way for hosting market when it's saturated, commodity and nothing unique required. You want experience, not some new, unique idea from someone without experience.
But I'm sure you have a few examples of successful hosters that started from unique ideas.
What? I can because saturation means you have to find a not saturated angle.
I can’t even respond to your reply with something worthwhile because you’re so far off.
Experience means nothing, there are tens of thousands of people with experience in the field.
One way to be a successful newcomer in a market like this is to simply be unique, but that gap is getting thinner and thinner.
And to answer your sarcastic question meant to be an argument, sure, a few replies up I linked to a company doing something fairly unique.
Although you’re right in the sense that those companies that aren’t unique and still growing simply rely on capital; they’re more investment companies than hosting companies.
I just thought creating a company like that is not possible for most people, including our thread starter, hence, the solution is:
”Become super rich first” isn’t a solution. The above can be.
I'll try to think of something to be unique, or something to provide more than a hosting service. Have a few things in mind.
Combination offers are great if the product that’ll get combined with hosting is something that the target audience looks for before looking for hosting.
Since you’ll be able to sell them before they’ve even thought about it, comparing highly competitive offers from huge companies.
For small scale businesses with 4-10 staff members, paying $100 for hosting and it just works is so much more worth it compared to spending $1 and having to learn how to monitor it, WorsPress basics, how to backup, how to upgrade stuff, what to do if it gets hacked etc etc.
A web designing company that we worked with when I worked full-time with SEO didn’t even ask if the client wanted hosting too, they assumed so from the start and based their quotes on the fact.
And they charged a lot more than $7, they included monitoring, sometimes updating stuff, backups, etc.
But that’s common practice now.
I may also have thought about reselling dedis, at a lower price than at what I get them, bearing a loss, gaining customers. But after that I haven't thought how to profit out of it, or how to turn those gained customers to a profiting customers.
And a chargeback will bankrupt you.
Francisco
I know that, but is there a way that at first I do this and then later turn the business profitable?
You likely won't. There's a couple providers I plan on staying with as long as there in business. I've had a dedicated server with the same company for the past 10 years. If their prices increased to the point of not being affordable on my budget (whatever the reason may be) I'd be looking for a less expensive alternative or looking to ditch my service completely. Having a server isn't a necessity. Even though I love having servers and the things they provide, it's not oxygen. Things may be less convenient/quick/cool, but that'd be the first expense cut if things get tight.
Is this a hobby or a business? If it's a hobby, maybe you can justify losing a few bucks here/there because you like tinkering or you see it as a way to learn.
As a business it's going to eat your brain and heart at the same time. You're going to get tired very quickly helping ungreatful brats of customers that pay very little, or in your mind, you're taking a loss on.
You're going to get into a fight in a ticket over something stupid, and you're going to want to throw the keyboard out the window. You'll then calm down for a sec, check how much you're losing on them, and then question it all.
Shared/resellers is fine, it's cheap to get into that market and you can always sponsor some space to your local communities, church, things like that, while not breaking the bank.
I've got enough years in this market, and am jaded enough, to know what I'm talking about.
Francisco
Okay, so as you might have read in previous comments, guys suggested that this is an oversaturated market and I should not jump onto it if I don't have anything unique to offer. Can you give your 2 cents on this take?
To answer your question, its a hobby at first, then if it kicks on might start it as a business. But I'll put my sweat in my hobby too, so not just doing it for the sake of getting the jolt out of it.
>
So many true from a big man
same problem for my
Okay, so as you might have read in previous comments, guys suggested that this is an oversaturated market and I should not jump onto it if I don't have anything unique to offer. Can you give your 2 cents on this take?
Yes and no. The 'general purpose' hosting where you're trying to compete on google keywords and crap like that? You're screwed. You see it all the time on here or on LES where some random UK kid makes another host, posts a bunch of ads, and doesn't make it to the next months renewal. It's a hard hard market to get into. Hell, there's sales on this very forum that won't make it to the fall.
Selling to your local communities if you're not in a mega metro? Totally possible. We have countless shared resellers that just sell to their own countrymen and they must be doing fine given they keep filling their plans and adding more services.
Francisco
You mean, start small, in local communities and grow from there?
Absolutely.
These days the only real way to differentiate yourself from other hosts is to offer better customer service. Most hosts resell from the same place, or offer the same CPU/hardware/etc. You can make your bread and butter by just having good customer service/support.
For what it's worth shared customers generally don't jump ship unless there's a really good reason to. We closed sales on our shared/resellers for 2 years and most nodes only lost 15% or less of their customers. Some lost less than a handful.
You'll sell the plans slowly, but you'll also have a pretty reliable base there.
That's just my take and my mentality going into Namecrane.
Francisco
This would be the best (and more responsible) way to go.
And like Francisco said, people suck man. Just by some of the questions/posts here on LET makes me not want to wonder how terrible it must be to be a provider sometimes. I wish there was a "Tales From Service Providers" that had anonymized tickets to show how terrible clients can truly be because there's nothing that would surprise me. People expect Dom Perignon on a Banquet beer budget.
Between scammers, dumbasses, tightwads and entitled people, unless you're a glutton for punishment, I don't even understand why someone would willingly want to hop into such a market (unless it was for local clients.)
Read my trustpilot some time.
Francisco
No.
Your discounted rates should still make you a (maybe very small) small profit. The bare minimum is covering your costs plus a small margin for the costs you don't know about yet and are too inexperienced in business to have predicted.
Obviously, if you do this, your discounted rates still won't make it worthwhile doing, but it's sufficient to build a customer base without making a massive loss other than your time, and opportunity cost of not being able to earn money in another job while doing this.
The your standard rates should be at least enough to make it worthwhile doing this job rather than working in a different job.
If you're planning to offer a reseller package, the price you charge them needs to be high enough to cover your fees but low enough that they can still run promotions themselves. So, at a guess, you probably want your costs to be at most 40% of the price the reseller will want to sell at so that you can charge them 50% of their price. Their standard price, or close to it, can then be your standard price too, and they can provide their own value their way to justify their prices and people can choose to go directly to you if they want.
But, and this is a huge but, in the hosting industry there are already many players, and the already established ones have a huge advantage over you - they already have their infrastructure in place, they probably have spare hardware, they already have contracts with data centres, etc... The prices they can achieve on their special deals are likely a fraction of what you can achieve any time soon.
Those first customers will always be at the price they joined at, unless they happen to expand in the future and they're happy with your service. Even then, it'll be a hard sell, and expect them to negotiate cheaper rates for the extra business. And why should they pay much more later on when they already know you can provide the service for much cheaper? If you jack up their prices to the regular ones, you can expect them to just walk away if there are cheaper offers elsewhere - because if you're competing on price, and your price is higher than someone else, that's literally your only advantage gone.
Everyone else has said the same. Find the thing that will make your service special that they can't get elsewhere, and can't easily just be bolted on to someone else's service.
@DigiGoon - I'd say worst case, try buying reseller shared hosting to dip your toes in the water. You wouldn't be out much cash and the only thing you'd really lose is your time invested.
The price you charge vs what you pay will be profitable nearly immediately (instead of willingly taking a loss right off the bat) and you can get a feel for dealing with people. If I were you, I'd try and keep it as local as possible. If you look at BuyVM's trustpilot, you'll see 90-95% of the complaints of from sketchy countries complaining about their fraud check system. The terms and how to avoid having your order held up any longer than it has to be is right there in black and white but in the customer's eyes, it's still a provider problem. So even when it's not your fault, it's your fault. Then the rest seem to be pretty much DMCA related, which as you may or may not know, isn't enforced in Luxembourg. The law is what it is, but again, his reviews take a hit because people are unsatisfied. Then there's one stars in there for people who are complaining about not being able to get a server because they're out of stock. So even when you finally hit that point of saturation where you're sold out, you're STILL the bad guy because you don't have enough. See where this is all going?
Then you have to take into consideration how much you value your time. Fran has weekends off (I'm pretty sure?) but other providers, to stay competitive, work weekends as well. Hobbies are great until they start unnecessarily encroaching into your regular life. When someone has issues, they don't care about what you have going on, they just want to know when it's going to be fixed. This is what Fran also mentioned.. you're going to come to that point where you get a true asshole, realize how much you're not making and think "Is this really worth it?" - it's better to have that revelation before you invest too much into it than to hit it balls to the wall and lose your ass (and possibly your sanity.)
P.S. After reading Fran's trustpilot, I still don't know why Karen gets such a bad wrap. Karen's always been awesome to me. I can only imagine the complaints about her are due to "act like an asshole, get treated like an asshole"
I remember back in 2013 when you offered teamspeak hosting, one of my new guild members paid through shared pay $800 worth of credits, only to rage quit the guild the next day, I think you were kind enough to refund that lad and keep us in business, wonder how much loss you incurred on that.
What @Francisco said about local countrymen is true and that’s excatly what I meant with ”or have contacts”
But I didn’t describe it as good
This is basically what I’m doing
But I only have 1 client
However that 1 client is good money
And I don’t really sell hosting
Sure, it’s a part of it, but my main part is I fix things and advice them on technical stuff
Finding these businesses is hard though