Starting a Shared Web Hosting Company
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@aaronstuder said:
Going to start small and grow slowly focusing on providing excellent customer service.
For Operating System I'll be using CentOS 6/7.
For Control Panel I'll be using CentOS Web Panel (I think.....)
For Redundancy - I'll be using 2 providers and 2 different geographic locations (maybe as many as 4)
The website will be running on WordPress, and our ticketing will JIRA Service Desk.
Basically, I will be setting up this twice
https://assets.digitalocean.com/articles/architecture/production/production.png
Any recommendations?
What is your personal goal out of curiosity? Is this for practice, something to do, or are you actually attempting to make money?
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Web hosting would be really difficult to make a decent living in to justify the work. I would personally focus on delivering other IT services like setting up networks/troubleshooting/etc. Remote and on-site to start. Then you could move into all remote down the road if you wanted and the business grew. Possibly hosting your own Colo if businesses wanted their gear offsite and cloud costs weren't feasible or possible with customer contracts. That's where I see the real money at, and overall the best customer service experiences. When you deliver a solution and people are in a panic because their network is down, you get big money and big thank you's.
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Without reading the thread, as someone who started a shared hosting company in 1998 and has been dealing with it since then, it barely pays for itself. You really need to have tons and tons of customers for it to work out. Customer service doesn't really mean a damn thing, because the kind of people who really obsess about that when it comes to web hosting don't know anything, which means because they don't know anything, they'll go with GoDaddy or whatever their registrar provides.
The only way to really work is to provide hosting of something most others don't, like Windows hosting. If you're providing LAMP, your service has been done, and is everywhere, and nobody is going to move to you. Providing node.js hosting and other things is going to be much more difficult in a shared environment as well, so I wouldn't count on grovesocial moving to you. You maybe can get some of your clients to move their sites, but you won't be living off it.
Customer service couldn't hold up any of the many open source companies as making them "different", there's no reason to think it'd make a difference with yours.
I used to reply to all the threads on Spiceworks about this, every few weeks somebody else wants to do it. Weirdly no one ever comes back saying they were successful.
Also with your image/design. That won't work in shared hosting environments, because you don't know if the customer's application even can handle load balancing, most can't and it'll just confuse them and possibly break their app, or at the very least end up logging your balancer's IP address as every single one of their visitors.
The way we do it is having several Apache instances running on each server along with some customised stuff going on, chroot, etc. We do provide services where people can have load balancing, but nobody provides direct, out of the box load balancing or redundancy to customers who are looking for shared hosting, because people who are looking for that don't usually use shared hosting, and the kind of people who use shared hosting are the kind of people who don't know how to deal with it.
Security is a damn nightmare. I've seen many shared hosts over the years get rooted or have processed spawned from PHP, Perl, etc which worked outside of the configuration bounds, etc.
It'll cost a lot and you won't make your money back, unless you figure out how to be very niche, and then you've got other problems because if it's that niche there won't be a "how to setup X hosting company" tutorial out there, complete with dealing with billing, refunds, security nightmares, etc.
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@aaronstuder I know I may be quite late to the game but the other option companies are doing is using the hyperconverged solution from HTBase (www.htbase.com)
With that, you can build a cloud environment utilizing existing or new hardware that you may acquire as well as it comes with an "AWS like" panel where your clients can go online, create their own virtual machines and have total control of that.
Along with that "AWS like" panel, called Fortis, you get an Application Market, where you can provide customers with customized applications that can be installed automatically as they create their vms. There is a charge back mechanism and others.
And, if you need to scale and want to use cloud servers, there is OCH, the OneCloud Hypervisor, that allows you to get resources from cloud providers such as AWS and GCE and make them work as internal infrastructure for you (www.htbase.com/och)
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@htbase said
@aaronstuder I know I may be quite late to the game but the other option companies are doing is using the hyperconverged solution from HTBase (www.htbase.com)
And, if you need to scale and want to use cloud servers, there is OCH, the OneCloud Hypervisor, that allows you to get resources from cloud providers such as AWS and GCE and make them work as internal infrastructure for you (www.htbase.com/och)Hi there.
The demo links are not working when I click to them on the homepage, any chance you could look into that? I'm interested in checking it out.
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@Breffni-Potter For sure, here is a demo:
OCH:
Youtube VideoRecorded webcast on customer case:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5007994365658541058 -
Oh right, I thought it was an actual, let's play with the interface demo.
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If you would like, we can get you access to an aws instance with OCH and you can spin off a server there and start creating VMs in it with OCH
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your probably find a lot of customers would like Cpanel as well, and if you then go on to reselling then you would need WHM and cpanel.
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@htbase said in Starting a Shared Web Hosting Company:
If you would like, we can get you access to an aws instance with OCH and you can spin off a server there and start creating VMs in it with OCH
The tiniest instance, really I'm just interested in playing with the interface and seeing how to manage it. I'll dropped you a chat with my email if you want to take further.
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@StuartJordan In our case, you have Fortis, which is an end-user interface that you can give to customers.
On Fortis they can create their own VMs, have applications automatically installed and others along with the charge back.
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@htbase - I see, more targeting vps instances then rather than basic static web hosting pages.
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oooh ... you're entering a market that's already saturated with an entire smorgasbord of vendor types.. penetrating this market would be a challenge...
What is the key differentiator, that you have ?
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@Veet said in Starting a Shared Web Hosting Company:
oooh ... you're entering a market that's already saturated with an entire smorgasbord of vendor types.. penetrating this market would be a challenge...
What is the key differentiator, that you have ?
It would've been nice to see what HTBase had to say, lol.
