Article in Hosting & Security

Some people think web hosting is an easy business that they can setup in no time, and then they can start earning thousands of dollars in a couple of months, that's why we see hundreds of new hosts popup each month, some running from reseller plans and they are all under the same impression that hosting is an easy money business. They fail to understand that this business is a commitment, and all of what you have is your reputation and your clients, once your reputation has been damaged due to poor planning, poor security or poor management, it is very hard to regain the confidence and clear up the bad reputation you companies name earned.

I will try and explain the process of starting a web hosting business, how to setup the basic structure of your company and some marketing advise.

Who's your target market?

1st of all you need to decide who is your target market? do you want to offer Linux based hosting? or Windows? do you want to target high end users? or are you looking to target gaming clients? do you want to offer reseller web hosting? or do you want to stay limited to shared web hosting?

You need to answer all of these question, you need to identify your target market, their age range and the avg. income your target users make, all of these questions will help you setup your business, your pricing structure and your marketing plan, without a clear idea about such issues you will run into allot of trouble, and probably spend more money and waste more time re-working what you've done wring, and incase you weren't prepared for this, you might close up and call it a day, thus the term "fly by night hosts" came up, due to lots of hosts opening and closing without the clear idea of what this business needs and the costs/effort it would take.

Once you have answered all of these question, and have a clear idea about your target market, your ready to move on to the next step.

Your Website

To start a web hosting business you should have a website, you need a domain name (it is recommended that you register the domain name with a company other than the company your getting your server/VPS from), avoid any personal names, and you need your actual website pages, you can either have those custom designed by either a firm or a freelancer, or you could you use a ready made templates, I wouldn't recommend choosing a cheap template, and always try to customize the looks of your template, having a custom made logo placed in the templates is always a good idea, 1st impressions always make a difference, I will be more willing to order web hosting from a company that took the time to care about how their website's look compared to a company that uses a $10 template and slapped some text there. As I said earlier, web hosting is a commitment, I want to buy a web hosting plan from a company that looks stable and professional.

It is recommended that you use simple language when you write your website's content, avoid technical terms that might confuse the user, keep in mind that most of your users may not have any previous web hosting experience, always simplify the signup process and don't ask for information that you don't need.

Your Servers

You need to determine what kind of server your getting, how many servers are you getting, and on what platform will these servers run, by now you should know the answers to these questions from the questions you answered when you determined your target market, your budget also plays a big role in answering the questions above, if your on a tight budget, you can start with a VPS (Virtual Private Server) which is in short words, a big reseller account with the privacy and dedicated resources of a dedicated server.

You also need to determine whether you need a managed server or not, usually managed servers or VPS's cost more, will you be hiring a staff member to handle managing the server/s, do you have the technical ability to handle managing a server, or would it be a better idea if you handeled the marketing and promotion of the companies offerings and had the company your renting the server from or a staff member handle the management? servers need managing on almost daily basis, certain software needs to be up to date to avoid any security threats and some clients usually need constant support.

One more important aspect you should take care of before we move on to the next step is selecting the company your getting the server/VPS from, this is a very important aspect that must be researched before making the commitment with a company that you will be hosting your clients with, it is recommended that you search on forums for reviews about the company, www.webhostingtalk.com is one of the biggest web hosting forums and has a wealth of information about good and bad web hosting companies, a simple search on the company's name will reveal allot of useful information.

Your Companies Staff

Depending on your budget, you should consider hiring some staff to help with the management of clients issues such as billing and technical support, having some support staff offering 24/7 live chat is always a good sign of professionalism, having 24/7 support phone number is even a better sign of professionalism, selecting your staff members is also a vital step for giving your company the right image, your staff need to be fluent in English (or the language your website is written in) and knowledgeable in their areas and its all limited to your budget and how much your willing to spend on these areas.

There are a number of companies that offer client support in your name, and it is usually more affordable than hiring your own staff. You also need to consider the software you will be using to handle the billing and the support of your clients, below are some of the more well known products:

1- Modernbill. http://www.modernbill.com

2- WHM Auto pilot http://www.whmautopilot.com

3- Client Exec. http://www.clientexec.com

All of the scripts above provide you with the functionality to support both billing and client support tasks.

Your Marketing and Promotion Plan

Determining your target market is a vital step in your marketing plan, I would recommend starting with your offline contacts and your local area, especially if your on a tight budget, some general ideas in marketing to your local market can be:

1- Print out business cards and distribute them to everyone you know.

2- Print flyers and place them where you deem appropriate (depending on who your target audience is)

3- Contact web designers and web design firms in your area and try to reach a deal with them to cooperate with each other, where you refer web design clients to them and they refer web hosting clients to you, if they already have a deal with another company, try and give them a better deal, you need all the clients you can get when you 1st start.

4- Running ADs on local newspapers and tech related magazines is a good idea if you can afford it,

5- Contact local businesses and see if they have a website, if they do introduce what you offer, if they don't refer them to a web design partner you have.

Online promotion: online advertising is a big subject, however here are some ideas that you can further look into:

1- Banner Ads, placing banner Ads on websites that are frequented by your target audience, web hosting forums and directories are also good placed to place Ads on.

2- PPC advertising, PPC refer to Pay Per Click, where you pay search engines such as Google or Yahoo to place your text AD under the sponsored links section when users search for the keywords you are targeting, you can learn more about these service on Google website https://www.adwords.google.com and Yahoo's publisher Network www.publisher.yahoo.com

3- Search Engine Optimization is another way to get targeted traffic to your website where your website is optimized for specific keywords so it comes up on the 1st pages on the major search engines for those keywords.

A mixture of the above usually works the best, also limited to your marketing budget.