How did you get your first paying hosting customers?

MadsKristiansen

I'm looking for some advice from people who have actually built a hosting business.

I'm a co-founder of a small Danish cloud infrastructure provider. We've spent a considerable amount of time building our own infrastructure, including KVM virtualization, distributed storage, networking, managed databases, and a customer portal with billing.

The technical platform is operational. The problem is that we haven't managed to turn it into a sustainable business.

At this point, I'm not looking to build the next AWS. Even €1,000 in monthly recurring revenue would make a meaningful difference.

I'm primarily an infrastructure engineer, not a salesperson, but I'm prepared to put serious effort into customer acquisition.

I'd really appreciate hearing from other hosting providers:

• How did you acquire your first 5–10 paying customers?
• Which services were easiest to sell when you were starting out?
• Did direct outreach work, or did most customers come through referrals and partnerships?
• If you were starting again today with infrastructure already in place, what would you do differently?

I'm particularly interested in experiences from smaller independent hosting providers rather than general startup advice.

Thanks in advance.

allthemtings

Starting a hosting business in this economy is crazy, better odds to all in on black

JasonM

by giving them recurring deals at dirt-cheap LE pricing.

unsafetypin

idk i notice most new people deadpool pretty fast or just don't pay their bills, sell the company shortly after being unprofitable and broke, fuck it all up. they seem to do a lot of things to get customers that cost them money to start out so it seems you need deep pockets and to pray

network

@MadsKristiansen said: How did you acquire your first 5–10 paying customers?

If you price it at $7/yr we here would buy literally anything.

LEBUserJoe

Not everyone is having issue getting hardware :P

I won some absolute steals recently an auction. prices was great before AI boom prices let's put it that way, I suggest you check your local liquidation.

Got PB's of DDR4 at below $0.50/GB plenty of DDR5 and more EPYC processors than I have use for basically for free

To OP, never offer more than you can sell.

KVM should of been first product to gain your customers before expanding if you do not already have great social business relations to tap into.

hello0wrld

@LEBUserJoe said:
Not everyone is having issue getting hardware :P

I won some absolute steals recently an auction. prices was great before AI boom prices let's put it that way, I suggest you check your local liquidation.

Got PB's of DDR4 at below $0.50/GB plenty of DDR5 and more EPYC processors than I have use for basically for free

To OP, never offer more than you can sell.

KVM should of been first product to gain your customers before expanding if you do not already have great social business relations to tap into.

Just out of curiosity, what country and area are you in? I'm highly interested in the DDR4 and DDR5 RAM you mentioned having

tentor

First few customers Skhron got were from bitcoin-vps.com

LEBUserJoe

@hello0wrld said:

@LEBUserJoe said:
Not everyone is having issue getting hardware :P

I won some absolute steals recently an auction. prices was great before AI boom prices let's put it that way, I suggest you check your local liquidation.

Got PB's of DDR4 at below $0.50/GB plenty of DDR5 and more EPYC processors than I have use for basically for free

To OP, never offer more than you can sell.

KVM should of been first product to gain your customers before expanding if you do not already have great social business relations to tap into.

Just out of curiosity, what country and area are you in? I'm highly interested in the DDR4 and DDR5 RAM you mentioned having

I'm based in EU, but this ram will be deployed shortly I don't buy for fun I have real-world usecase for it and a good chunk will be for my homelab boner to grow

I don't sell anything here on LET, I just got addicted to buying VPS and cant leave

MikeA

I was grateful that some people from a past company I worked under stuck with me after I started my own thing. Since I wanted to do things right. I think a few are still around even after like 10 years.

sillycat

@allthemtings said:
Starting a hosting business in this economy is crazy, better odds to all in on black

@emgh reakt it