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Shared web hosting - business case [RESEARCH]
Hi Guys,
While this forum is mostly for VPS/dedi providers, I know that a lot of you provide shared web hosting service to customers (e.g. BuyShared) and this forum is very active (unlike WHT...) , so decided to make a post here.
First of all, there are absolutely no plans of becoming next "summer host" in any way. Not interested in this absolutely. I am making a business case for a certain product/service and need to learn more about a business of running a (shared) web hosting company (2500+ hosted domains/accounts). Searching in Google gives you so many affiliate-generated content that has almost no value/information.
I was hoping you could help me or point in a right direction on what are the costs a shared webhosting provider has when running this business. Some, most obvious questions that I have:
- What is a potential spend on hardware (either rented or bought)?
- What are some most typical server configs being used for this?
- How much does the bandwidth costs?
- What licensing costs you are bound to have (e.g. paid hosting control panels, maybe backup software, etc)?
- How many employees and what positions are essential in running this operation?
- What positions are likely to be outsourced and what positions is better keeping in-house (e.g. developers, sysadmins)?
- How many support staff members you would potentially need?
- What are the services that customers ask most often?
- Anything else that I have (most certainly) missed?
Surely, I understand that this information isn't generally shared in public (some sensitive/commercial related info), so feel free to PM me, if you would like to share.
Thanks a lot in advance for your help!
Comments
This obviously depends on what kind of hardware you're looking for and how many customers you want to facilitate.
Various. Better to virtualize a machine and spend less on licensing costs for cPanel. See first answer.
Depends on country you're interested in and supplier.
You can get cPanel internal for cheap from your provider, we do this for $14/month to cover transaction fees. Then if you wanted CloudLinux it's around $13/month. R1Soft is a popular choice for automated and customer restorable backups.
To start with you only need yourself and ideally someone else, you can contract or hire as you expand.
In my opinion, it's better to keep everything in-house but if you can't afford to, try and keep finance related teams in house. Support can be outsourced with limited access to prevent collateral damage in the event something goes bad.
Doesn't the employee question cover this?
Bonus services are free SSL certificates (with LetsEncrypt), and R1Soft CDP.
Is this an existing hosting company you are considering acquiring?
You dont need a hardware from the first day. Get a reseller account or master reseller and once you start to sell services like $200 month you can get a server and purchase licenses.
If you start with server, do it now till its summer
um, isn't it already summer
@WHT
In case you haven't seen the "super reseller" diagram:
Master resellers are unsustainable as is; no need to make them worse.
Thanks for your help here, I appreciate it!
I am thinking about a case of already established hosting company (more than 2500 hosted domains/customers). My impression is that this size of operation won't be a one-man show.
From my research (but I'd rather have some more concrete examples), I see that dedicated servers with 8-16 cores, 16-32GB RAM and 1-2TB HDD appear most frequently and generally quite cost-effective. Later on, they are either being split into VPSes or have cPanel/Plesk/DirectAdmin/etc installed and accommodate around 200 (?) hosting accounts.
Indeed, many it would be cheaper to virtualize from licensing perspective. Maybe you have some ideas on what bare-metal servers give a relatively decent performance?
Let's assume that the server location would be in a country in Europe with a good connectivity (e.g. the Netherlands or the UK)
OK thanks, how about something like KernelCare, Softaculous, sitebuilders? Is it something that would be generally "part of the deal"?
Makes sense, with in-house staff you have more control over the company. I assume for managing around 2500 customers, it would be something like 3 sysadmins and 3-4 support representatives (full-time)?
No acquisition taking place, just a research and learning more about web hosting business to satisfy my curiosity. MAAAYBE, in a far future I would consider making a move but that definitely won't happen anytime soon.
This is just a research into already established hosting companies (2500+ customers), not planning to start my own.
Most people don't care for site builders but Softaculous is a given; as is CloudLinux for 'Good' hosts. If it was a one man band I'd not expect anything but if you've potentially got 2,500 clients then those things should be top of the list :-)
Many of the questions you asked have completely arbitrary answers.
Anything from a dual L5520 upwards will be just fine, and if you are feeling brave offloading MySQL to SSD helps. You can create a single OpenVZ container or QEMU/KVM for cloudlinux to reduce license costs.
A few IP's will also help if you need to nullroute an IP/reseller for incoming DDoS.
Most people won't notice a minute downtime for server reboots, don't worry about it.
Depends if they all make tickets at the same time! Most cPanel customers won't need anything as far as support goes.