Guidelines for New Web Hosting Companies

What You Need to Know Before Taking the Plunge

Today, it seems like everyone and their grandma wants to start a web hosting company. To the naked eye, it seems extremely easy. Get a generic template, grab a reseller account, configure a few things, and start making some cash. But, as any veteran of the web hosting industry knows, things get much more complicated than that very quickly and anyone considering entering the web hosting industry should first consider these complications.


First and foremost, getting a web site up and running from which to sell hosting isn't as easy as it might seem. First, a template is needed. Then, pages describing the company, its services, and its plans are all required. After that, a program such as WHM Autopilot needs to be configured so that when someone orders web hosting the order will go through automatically. Additionally, all of this needs to be visually appealing.


Once the website is up and running from which to sell the web hosting from, then comes actually selling the web hosting itself. Web hosting is an extremely crammed and competitive market, and finding customers who for one will visit the website and for two actually need the web hosting (and find the pricing desirable) is very difficult to do. There are plenty of other options out there, usually cheaper and from more established, reputable web hosting companies, that are trying to get those same customers. Make sure a marketing plan is in mind prior to taking the plunge.


Then comes what is arguably the most difficult aspect of running a web hosting business, the customer support. Customers usually pay an average of $10/month for the hosting, which obviously isn't very much. So, when something goes wrong and customers need to be consulted and dealt with, or just when the customer doesn't know what they are doing, the hourly pay can drop well below minimum wage very quickly. Larger hosts usually either have dedicated staff or hire a third party "support ticket" type company for handling the web hosting customer support, but that should only be considered once the company is actually making money.