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How did you get your first paying hosting customers?
MadsKristiansen
Member
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.
Comments
Starting a hosting business in this economy is crazy, better odds to all in on black
by giving them recurring deals at dirt-cheap LE pricing.
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
If you price it at $7/yr we here would buy literally anything.
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
First few customers Skhron got were from bitcoin-vps.com
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
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.
@emgh reakt it
Take @HostBilby who started recently and people really like him. He used deadpool deals to get noticed. Then what keep people with him are his competence on the technical stuff, stable performance and uptime of the servers. He's honest and transparent about his setup, and more importantly has a real personality, not a faceless hosting companies like many new providers. No template or AI responses or other corporate BS.
He also has a somewhat more unique location like Toronto, CA. When people ask about Cananda, Hostbilby is usually recommended along side another well known name like @servarica_hani
P.S. @HostBilby can I get some account credit for being a shiller loyal customer?
Thanks for the shout mate! You kinda nailed it, you need to be noticed - for that on LE* it generally means marketed plans (aka spend marketing dollars on acquiring customers that would normally be unsustainable). Be honest/transparent if you're willing to, if you're not, you need other drawer cards IMO.
@ OP - Acquiring customers in any business is hard - doesn't matter if it's a plumber or cloud services... Your business plan should outline what you offer, why people want to buy it and who those people are. Then you find where those people are and figure out the best way to reach them and convince them.
If you haven't done that work yet, I'd highly advise it. It's a great grounding exercise in limiting yourself from trying to run after every single lead. It also helps to align your marketing material (Website, Offers, Communications) to a standard and ensures you find some consistency across those areas.
Answers
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?
We had different luck, started with a reseller account at totalchoicehosting.com 27 years ago. Went from that to a $3 million datacenter in Mexico. What helped us was I was teching an html class and my students needed a place to host/test their projects. We gave every student a hosting account for free until the class ended, had a 90% retention rate with my students. One of my biggest target was we were some of the first to offer php 5, we rebuilt our website pushing php 5 hardcore and ended up on Google ranked 1-2 for php 5 hosting. From there we got a server, then 10 servers, then 40 and our own rack(s) and grew from there. After that one of my business partners was doing an emerging market and felt Mexico was the next big place to be. So $3 million later we had a DC.
The DC failed and we lost millions, ended up selling of the company and the hardware afterwards. But we had a good 15 year run, learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, but never quit.
Another thing we did was find other web designers and straight up asked them if they needed a hosting partner, now again this was the early 2000's but we had a ton of luck with that as well.
Don't try and be everything to everyone, pick a market and grow it, then add your next piece, and so on and so forth.
Good Luck!
Anthony
I'm not a sales expert but don't do big unsustainable offers/sales on LET. It bad for You and bad for customers too. Do some market research. The mentioned location probably would be interesting for many LET users. Should planning for long term, use Your own infrastructure if possible (hardware, IP ranges, control panel). Provide reliable services for sustainable prices.
As customer I would be happy for a cheap small (512MB RAM, 10GB disk, 1xIPv4) KVM box with Danish IP.. But it wouldn't be profitable for You
All them balls it s korekt
For something like you have, finding a niche industry to serve, preferably one you know well is likely to be your path of lease resistance.
"Easy Cloud Infrastructure For [Insert niche] Service Businesses"
If your goal is to rapidly reach that goal, doing so on forums like this, with the likes of the typical deal rate and contract length - isn't going to be it.You're likely to eat the bottom out from underneath of you serving insane expectations.
You can be a "hosting provider" - but it sounds to me like you invested in more than just metal.. so I would highly suggest looking at being a "solution provider".
Hi, to answer your questions based on our own experience of building business:
In the beginning, we were involved in web software development and building websites for customers. Back then (before AI tools were everywhere), we simply started offering our own shared hosting directly to the customers we were building websites for. Bundling the hosting with the web design service was the easiest way to secure those first 5-10 regular, recurring customers.
Which services were easiest to sell when you were starting out:
This entirely depends on your target audience and their specific needs. For us, our customers weren't setting up game servers or requiring infrastructure; they just needed a reliable home for their regular websites. Because of that, standard Shared Hosting was by far the easiest service to sell.
Direct outreach sometimes works and is almost mandatory at the very beginning, you have to put in the hard work to get those initial clients onboard. However, once you establish that initial base, the momentum shifts. After those first direct sales, the vast majority of our new customers started coming through recommendations and direct referrals from the circles of our existing clients.
Get a provider tag here, is a good start. Offer $7/year and raise (2x or 3x) after 1 year.