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Oppose to reselling(which is nothing wrong with) You could invest in Hardware then collocate which some of the big providers on LET/LEB do which makes it cheaper in the long run.
Sorry, yes you are correct. The big cost there was WHMCS though.
You don't have to use WHMCS you can use boxbilling and upgrade boxbilling to pro when you get more customers or switch to whmcs, providing a quality service is more important than what billing software you use.
Any of the hosts making serious money aren't paying the face-value rates. As your relationship with your providers becomes better so will your prices and ability to negotiate.
Also your ability to negotiate will also be better the more servers/etc you buy from them.
Not everyone offers high pricing for IPs on dedicated servers is the solution
Prometeus VPS for all business started with 25 k eur and grew by investing those and the first equipments were from leasing after initially using already available hardware, but then the demand was so high that was far from enough. So, the leasing ended last month, all the equipment has been paid for. The colo costs are not low, the DC is state of the art, but we had extra traffic and power at first from the main business, however, now had to increase that for the side one especially.
All in all, the business was profitable from the first months, however it did not have to pay for all the fixed costs, such as staff, which is huge in EU, it also benefited from good hardware prices and leasing terms due to being an established company known for 10 years+ with excellent history and credit.
It is now possible to become independent, hire own staff, pay own colo at regular prices, etc, but the customers are far from being LE only, actually, due to space constraints and other problems, we are forced to select customers, i.e. favour old ones with good history over the new ones.
Okay, that was always the policy, but now, really, many products can only be made available to current customers in good standing due to stock issues, this is the case for all OVZ products, especially SSD ones, only OVerZold is still showing stock now and then while the others only in exceptional cases. We are also sold out for newer products, such as XenPower, only the cloud has still a lot of space due to the fact it was already designed to be large since clouds only scale well if they are big.
Conclusion: it works if this is not the main business, but, from my calculations, it is possible to survive too if LE was the only business, but you must be careful with abuse, have your own gear, excellent relations with DCs and a lot of time to be a one-man show for the first couple of years. After that, you should have 20 K income a month and you can afford to hire extra staff while the leasing was already paid.
I'm sure staffing is minimal for most start up LEB hosts. If you want to enter the market, be prepared to handle everything yourself for quite a while (24/7).
A few people here are implying that WHMCS and SolusVM are optionals and that free alternatives can be sought. I know if I saw a company using free software to run their operations I would run a mile. I want to see commitment from a provider before they get to see any of my monies.
Anyway, I agree with the OP in this thread. Some of the deals here are crazy and even more surprisingly sustainable.
Because SolusVM and WHMCS are such great software, huh?
I'm not claiming it is or isn't. Just that it looks like a cheap and quick job when free software is used, it shows now commitment and can be chucked up on a domain overnight.