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I want to make my own company for web hosting services. I plan to provide just shared web hosting. In the future I may extend my business to VPS. At first I just want to provide Linux hosting, in the future I will provide windows platform as well.

I do not have any background about how web hosting is organised, if you could recommend some books or tutorials before I start my business it would be helpful.

John Gardeniers
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Goma
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Based on my (poor) experiences with some hosting companies, you don't need to know much at all.

However, if you want to make a lot of money and have happy customers (usually the easiest way to money) you've got a metric crapton to learn, it's going to be a long and difficult process. I'd recommend sending your resume to an established hosting company and learning on the job if possible.

Chris S
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    +1 for that last sentence, which is the best advice I've seen for these kinds of questions. – John Gardeniers Mar 23 '11 at 08:00
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    Have to agree with this, especially the last sentence. I think for some things, if you have to ask how the answer is *you* don't, not just yet anyway. – Rob Moir Mar 23 '11 at 08:27
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If you are looking at hosting, you're going to have one question to answer first and foremost ... Why host with you and not somebody else ? What value added services do you provide that the established guys don't.

Once those have been answered, and you believe you have a business case, then you're going to have to decide on what sort of service you plan on offering your clients.

What are your Service Level Agreements ? What sort of uptime do you guarantee ? What sort of performance do you plan on providing ? What type of packages would you like to provide ? How much do you plan on charging clients / How much can you charge them before they go looking elsewhere.

Once you've got a brief idea of that, you'll want to think of hardware costs.

Do you plan on reselling another provider's services ? Do you plan on owning your own hardware ? Will you host this hardware at home ? Or will you rent out room in a colocation facility ? What sort of hardware will you require to be able to provide uptime/performance you want ? What sort of bandwidth will you need to have available. Will you need to purchase static IPs ?

Lastly ...

Is any of this cost effective ?

jonathanserafini
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Easiest way to get started in offering hosting is by using a reseller or whitelabel solution from an established host. They worry about all the infrastructure, employees, support, etc., and you get to offer hosting services under your own brand name. They typically do provide end-user technical support too; or you can handle that yourself.

Agreed with all the other comments here: it's complicated to start any business. Whitelabeling will also reduce (or almost eliminate) your capital expenses so you can focus on marketing. Hosting is a very competitive landscape.

Couple examples:

Good luck!

Ryan J. Stout
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  • Despite your answer is true, it is not helpfull to the original poster. The question is about acquiring some background before starting, with books, tutorials, etc. – Gregory MOUSSAT Nov 16 '16 at 23:21