In recent times, web design and development is a demanding and challenging business. Almost, every business person wants to take their business in online to get success quickly. With an increase of large number of websites and business coming online, peoples are getting interested in web hosting business.
Yep, in the last decade hosting business opened up a new window of opportunities for entrepreneur to initiate a small business start-up. If you never heard about “web hosting” terms before, then follow the link where I explore the hosting features in details.
In this post, I will explore how to start a web hosting company from your home and do it successfully. So let’s go to the breakdown of the tutorial.
- Define a web hosting brand
- Choose the right data center
- Developing a website
- Building billing system
- Start with reseller hosting
- Local advertising
- Providing hosting related service (WEB DESIGN, SSL CERTIFICATE)
Brand Identity
Defining the brand name of business is like creating the signature of your business in marketplace. So this is the first step, you have to focus on. In order to, doing a business you need to define your business identity.
Before, naming your brand you may consider the following issues I’ve listed below.
- What are your products/services?
- How it will work with your offering products and services?
- And what are core facts or values of your products/services?
As my opinion, in case of naming a hosting business brand, it’s more useful to use a ‘hosting’ related word or tag. Most of the giant hosting provider company used these methods to naming their brand like hostgator, bluehost, justhost etc.
Right data center
After choosing your brand name, you need to use a datacenter where you can rent equipment, storage and bandwidth. The entry cost of datacenter collocation varies in different features and terms. Actually collocation services are working as middle ground between building your private data center and your hosting business. There are many data center in the world but its tiny difficult to find out a collocation centre that rents server to a start-up company.
Don’t worry; I have a solution for this. Here is the list of datacenters where you can easily rent your desired servers.
- Soflayer Technologies Inc.
- Incero: Colocation & Servers
- Rackspace Inc
A collocation web hosting business is much cheaper than maintaining your own datacenters. You’ll get full control over your set-up and managing freely hardware and software. By the way, there’re some disadvantages also like a managed collocation center has come at an expensive operating costs that a small startup hosting company might not be able to afford.
Developing a website
To becoming a professional hosting provider, you must have a tremendous hosting website. A website itself served you to accomplish many business marketing strategies to help you meet your audience. This will represent your identity and logical existence virtually and also its cost effective than engaged with customers physically.
In fact, being visible in worldwide means the likelihood of gain customers is so high. In hosting business credibility is a main factor for vendors because most of the people will search the internet for a product to checking out facts, testimonials and positive word-of-mouth before making an order.
Here are some special features that might have in a hosting website-
- Live chat conversion
- Domain name checker
- Integrated Billing system
- Community management (Forum/blog)
Building billing system
After developing a website you have to build an automation billing system. It’s very important when professionalism and security comes to play a vital role in your business. There are not so many billing systems available for your business. So, which platform do you use?
Here I will recommend you to use WHMCS which is stand for Web Host Manager Complete Solution. This is an all-in-one client platform and it installs a system of high degree automation. With higher security alerts, WHMCS has strong tracking record to secure your server from spamming. Here are the key benefits to use WHMCS:
- Provide security support and automatic bans in the case of repeated logins attempt.
- Enable users to entire automation system throughout the billing process including account creation, suspension, termination and invoice generation.
- Integrated social network facilities – such as twitter, facebook and linkedin.
- Support ticket system for the answering clients query and maintaining the straightforward relationships.
- With multilingual options and huge variety of widgets, WHMCS gives you the opportunity to customize your platform as your choice.
- WHMCS provide cheaper service than any other automation billing software and also offer pre sales supports with their trials and demos.
- It’s partnered with various popular companies like Enom and Comodo to provide security scanning and reseller hosting services. As well as it has well managed control panel structures such as Direct Admin, Plesk and cPanel.
Start with reseller hosting
By choosing of reseller hosting plans initially you can actually start a brand new business. You don’t have to be an expertise and well experienced in hosting service to sell hosting as a reseller. And of course, it’s cheaper than other types of hosting. There is lots of international hosting provider offers reseller hosting such as hostgator, siteground, iPage and the price is varies on their service quality and resources.
As a newbie in hosting business, you can buy reseller from local or international brands but before making an order you have to find a reliable source and a well reputed organization which will provide great service & support. And their business reputation will help you to grow your business faster.
Some reseller hosting plan gives you the full control of managing customers’ hosting accounts and other control panel features thus you can put your company name or logo for branding and promotional activities. Furthermore some of the reseller plan gives you free of cost credits, as if your customer will allow promoting their business in social platforms such as facebook, twitter, instagram, Google, yahoo, bing etc. and you can also use these free credits to reach on more audience and promote your business globally throughout pay per click (PPC) advertising.
Local Advertising
So now you are all done with your new web hosting business set up. This is the time you have to move on with your marketing strategy to get customers and grow your business. “Words of Mouth” is excellent for business marketing but sometimes it’s not work, specifically for a new business.
Here I build up a list of marketing ideas, which you may try to reach your target market and promote your business. And also these are the methods that you don’t need so much investment in marketing.
Direct Mail
Direct mail can be effective for your business advertising, and is much more affordable than print media and other electronics media marketing. As a newcomer in hosting business, may be you don’t have any mailing list but there is an opportunity for you that you can target your mail geographically.
Business Cards
Yes, a business card represents you that you are doing a business. Eventually you can bring more traffic in your website throughout put your web address on them. Mind it, more and more people turning into web address for information. But some people forget to include their website name on their business card. And the most useful thing is, every time you have to bring it with your wallet, because you never know who you will run into or what opportunity might present itself.
There’re so many simple advertising strategy you may use:
- Community involvement (Forum commenting, Blogging & writing articles)
- Social media marketing (Facebook, twitter, linkedin)
- Participating in web related seminars
- Build an email marketing funnel
- Jon local business groups
Web hosting business related service
If you are able to running some hosting related services than you are most welcome. Services like website design and development, domain registration, SSL certificate would be a new dimension of your business growth. Many organizations offer their hosting plan merging with a web application package.
Even though, you can create a hosting plan with a free domain name which will attract customer. Here is the list of few services which you may provide as a web hosting provider.
- Website Design & Development
- Corporate Email Marketing & Services
- Domain Research, Registration and Migration
- Reselling SSL certificates
Summary
Lastly, if you are going to start a web hosting business then you have to concern about some issues like support and competition. 24/7 service has to be maintained properly by live chat, phone and mail. Though there are much more opportunity in web host but some host resellers like “Hostgator” made this as much more competitive that every single person can become a web host.
As a web hosting provider and owner of FaithHost.net, I would recommend you that, never underestimates a customer because it all starts with a small association.
So, finally my question is, do you think this post help you to extend your knowledge about web hosting. Give your answer in comments section below.