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If you want to succeed with ridiculous offers, sell loads of cheap yearlies to pay for monthly bills. It "works" for some
@raindog308 said: Well they did sell shared hosting, and do to customers who didn't leave them when they discontinued it, they get lower support priority, same with their reseller customers when they discontinued that, due to "Not making enough from them".
Ah, I didn't know that. So they have experience in failing :-)
Yeah, also he's still 16 I think. So 2 of 3 statements were incorrect. Tsk tsk!
Your idea of success greatly differs from others. Most people, myself included, wouldn't sell their soul in order to obtain money. They also wouldn't intentionally lie, cheat, and steal to "succeed". Yeah, money is nice, but waking up every morning and knowing you're a piece of shit as a person would really suck.
Edit: Your apology thread: Your issues should only be used to make you stronger. If people have said your service has an issue, investigate and fix it. Stirring people up does not help your situation, and since you're so young and enjoy getting a rise out of people, I can understand why you perpetually do it. Not to sound condescending, but I've been kidnapped, robbed and beaten; These events almost destroyed my life until I could let go of them.
@alexh That signature ...
come on now guys and gals they've taken a beating fine. please dont let this turn into another slagging match. im looking for helpful things like from @mrcbrown and @sz1hosting and @Licensecart 1st post :P
I'm not gonna discourage you from starting a business, but I wouldn't sign up with a provider who starts a business "because why not?"
They sure do haha I found out about how bad they was when I saw this on post: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=9093073&postcount=20
I reversed that decision shortly later FYI.
trainwreck.jpg
This guy makes productive posts.
I'm providing you advice: Don't take advice from GVH, and don't throw away your beliefs to earn money.
Edit: Please read to find out how ethically compromised our friend Jon is: https://vpsboard.com/topic/4360-hudsonvalleyhost-spamming-the-helpdesk/
what decision?
Here is some solid advice:
Read "Your First 1000 Customers in Web Hosting". It's a few years old but has good ideas and it's just about the only book on web hosting.
Figure out what you do differently than the other 1,000 hosts. "Great customer service" is not it, btw - everyone says that. This is where your new venture will probably fail to be honest. Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy.
Have a plan of how you'll handle support at 2am your time. Or set SLA expectations, but realize you're competing with hosts that provide 24x7 support.
Have a plan of how you'll handle backups. And restores.
TOS/AUP really should go through an attorney. Your liability is a lot more than the $X per month you're charging.
Learn the tech in and out - security, performance, sysadmin, web server, common packages, etc.
Have a business plan, even if the revenue side of it is mostly guesswork. The exercise of creating one is valuable to a new entrepreneur.
Your marketing needs to be more than "advertise on WHT"
Hardware will break, a VPS neighbor will go nuts, a DDOS attack will come, etc. How will you handle these?
Tip of the iceberg.
That's an excellent thing to second - If you have a stand on something don't let big dollar signs make you go "LETS DO IT!" I have those guys who want to throw me a couple hundred dollars to build spam-rigs with /27 and wanting to burn through IP's and be gone tomorrow - not about to burn a good relationship with a DC over 1 customer who wants to spam and run - deals from a DC and good relationships take time to build.
More to this life than money, apparently sleeping is one of them, my wife keeps telling me I need to do it more, but server migrations wait for no man ;-)
You should try shared hosting and VPS resellers, as they make it easier for you to manage your clients.
I feel like that is pointed towards me, no offence taken. Seriously.
I don't do drugs, this is who I am.
On a more serious note, if you need a reseller account, let me know.
Friends stop talking about GVH. This thread not for GVH Drama.
So don't make funny think in this thread ::: !! >
Ehm... I can give you some measurements based on real life cases. 95% of people I know in this field aren't very strong in maths.
A small 2 Cores 4GB VM and a separate 20GB size Database running on a shared and powerfull (although SATA3 disks) DB Server, can hold a web site that makes 5 million pages a month -only requires that code isn't written too bad.
To hold 60 low traffic sites (with CMS), let's say around a total of 1000-2000 pages a day, two lowend, cheap, second hand, dual core notebooks with 4GB are ok. One for Web Server and one for Storage.
A single server, old generation dual CPU (something like IBM eServer 326 o 345), with IDE disk can hold 200 low traffic sites, from 3000 to 5000 pages a day. Web Server and DB server all on the same machine.
The examples I'm bringing are for shared hosting environments, Windows or Linux and I'm talking obviously of well configured machines with carefully optimized settings. Average load and performace is more than acceptable.
But if you have high disk activity (like for an IMAP server) you'll need faster disks and most probably more CPU power.
My best choice if you want to become a hosting company is starting with two separate physical servers, one used as a backup of the other one.
For eg.:
Server 1: web server (and backup database server)
Server 2: database server (and backup web server)
3000 pages a day is about 2 pages per minute. A laptop could serve 1 page every 30 seconds. Those boxes could be driven much, much harder.
@alexh If I'm ethically compromised then your financial acumen is compromised.
Code I've been working on for 3 months in 3.... 2.... 1....
Yea Raindog, I was just reporting some number to show that you don't necessarily need super-servers to run a couple o hundred sites.
Just to do maths the right way, 3000 pages a day aren't 2 pages a minute because traffic is higher during 12-16 hours of the day with peaks a couple of times a day.
@rguru6:
From what you're saying, using this "dedicated server" is enough to host ~200 low traffic sites. And by low traffic as you described it's between 3000 and 5000 hits a day.
Setting some basis:
The plan: (We'll presume only one shared hosting plan is offered, I know you guys have more knowledge regarding the plans and their pricing, this is just an example)
Putting this plan at $3/month.
The costs: Presuming you don't have any sysadmin knowledge but you'll be providing sales support.
The advertising: let's not get deep into the advertising. We'll allocate $1000/year as our clients are local.
Finally, the server itself : €29,99month = ~$470/year (haven't done much research on the dedicated servers prices)
The total is going to be ~$6500.
Note that practically have no knowledge regarding those servers, I'm just doing what a newbie as myself would do
The server has 2x 1 TB SATA3 with Unmetered Traffic and 1Gbits/s.
We'll be using 1800GB, devide it by 5GB plan, that's 360 plans without overselling.
We'll presume, you got all those 360 shared plans sold (which is practically impossible in this market). You'll get 360x$3x12 = $12 960 in sales, minus $6500, you'll get a $6460 in profit without overselling.
You'll likely sold %40 (or less), 360x0.4x$3x12 = $5184, that's $-1316.
+Remember that you'll have enough data to setup an overselling quota and do more advertising to get more customers. From that point, it will all depend on you and your business (brand).
P.S: Financially, this is not accurate! I just wanted to give the op an idea on what he will be facing. This can be edited and optimized based on the targeted market. Maybe the server is too much for his potential clients, maybe I put too much in sysadmin or less in CS...
P.S.S: I'm planning to start my own hosting in a year or so. I guess that would be enough for me to understand the technical part as business wouldn't be a problem.
Thank you!