Hello,

I have been looking in to starting to offer web hosting services for about 6months now. I have looking in to reselling and dedicated. I currently just offer web site design services, and the work load is slow at times, so I am looking at offering hosting services and am trying to figure out what works best and what some of you out there are doing. I have considered reselling, but then the clients may be turned away because I resell at more cost than my provider does (even with my own virtual DNS a customer could figure out who I resell for).. and then there is the issue of me buying the accounts individually on my credit card and then billing my customers and the books involved with writing off each account as an expense and all. Then once I sell a certain amount of accounts its better to just go dedicated, and if I start off reselling then I have the inconvience of switching them all over to my dedicated server......

So I am thinking about just starting off dedicated. I am looking at RAQ servers (RackShack) and Linux servers.. I am not expecting this to be a huge hosting company with thousands of customers. I figure if I got a RAQ server and managed to get 50 customers, it would be worth it. If the demand gets high, and I have a hundred or 200 customers, thats great and I would buy more RAQ's..... I have been going over the numbers, of my costs for a RAQ and my costs to bill customers and all. So I have some questions...

How many accounts is too much for offering a reliable hosting service on a $99 RAQ (RackShack)?

I want it to be reliable. I will probably have a starter account that offers 25MB of web space and a few GIGS transfer allowance and 25 POPs, 1mySQL database, etc... and likely a medium sized account that offers 75-100MB of space and 50 to 75 POP3s and a few mySQLs... and a larger account of 150-200MB of space and 125POP3s or something (likely would not sell tons of these accounts)..

Would 50 customers be too much for this server? 100 customers? Would the server be able to handle the email load for that many hosting accounts?

I am not going to be offering ultra cheap $5 per month accounts or anything. I am thinking accounts will start at $10 or $12 a month and the high end accounts be $25 to $30 a month. I will sell to local businesses, and promote it (not SPAM it) online some, and sell accounts to my web design customers, referrals.

I looked at RackShack and they offer a ton of bandwidth.. lets just say that I offered 50MB accounts with 5GIGs of bandwith included.. and I had 50 customers... thats 250GB I have committed to offerring, and with RackShack, that would work. But then I looked at these other RAQ and Linux server companys and they seem to offer just 20 to 30GB of bandwith in their $100 to $150 monthly fees. So I am wondering how could you do that? Do you all actually buy as much bandwidth as you commit to each user in a plan? or would I be fine with host X number of accounts offering 3GB of bandwith, but yet I have 20GB included in my monthly fee?

I am just curious as to how many accounts you can run a reliable web hosting service on a RAQ from RackShack or any of the other RAQ providers?


How is business for you current RAQ users? Is 50 customers tough to get? Right now I am pretty sure I could get 10 in the first month, and thus my cost would be covered or close to it (I can eat the cost the first couple months if it goes slow).

Or would a BSD or Linux box be more powerful to offer a hosting service like this?


I guess I like the idea of the web based administration, I have worked with basic hosting set up on a Linux/BSD and Solaris system before (I use to work for a local web host and we had no real administrator, just a consultant and 2 guys that knew how enough to set up accounts and watch for odd things going on and all and provide good support). The web based administration seems pretty simple. I have had a user account on a RAQ 2 before and it worked well.

If any of you have ICQ or are willing to exchange some PM's or emails with me to offer advice on the business and all that would be great!

Thanks!

S.

--
23=myAge
#23=Michael Jordan, not me lol.

sorry, I have not read your whole posting (I am little bussy at the moment) but I have asked rackshack about their virtual hosting package (you know, the 100 MB webspace, cgi-bin, php and unlimited bandwidth stuff ...). They have told me, that they host 200 of that 100 MB Accounts on one server with 512 MB RAM.

you can find the thread here (http://forum.rackshack.net/showthread.php?threadid=925)

hope that helps
Lukas

search around a bit(sheesh, i'm starting to sound like a moderator), and you'll find all the answers you need to the question. especially in the other forums, not just the raq forum.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24795

is a good place to start.



from what you're saying, i say you'd be alright for a raq4i with 512mb ram to start off with if you're worrying about costs. 50 - 100 small - mid size sites should be ideal. but, that's my opinion.

100 customers wont be a problem.

And about the bandwith, you offer them 5 gig and most of your customers probably wont ever exceed 2 gig a month, thats normal practice.

go for it :)

Mm Skylab just beat me, i write to slow :)

It all depends. Right now we only have 62 clients but they have subdomains so we have a total of 101 accounts on our server (512 Memory). Most of which are only 100MB, 5 GB transfer, and we already need to get a second server because our CPU is overloaded really bad. We get several e-mails per day saying the CPU is overloaded and our server has gone down twice in the last week. (BTW - we are getting our new server in 4 days)

have you worked on tweaking the settings? apache, mysql, etc?


you can squeeze so much more out of a server by properly benchmarking and tweaking your raq.

i dropped my peak 15minute by almost half just by tweaking a base mysql install.

i'm going to fidget around with apache and php next.

Originally posted by inoverse
It all depends. Right now we only have 62 clients but they have subdomains so we have a total of 101 accounts on our server (512 Memory). Most of which are only 100MB, 5 GB transfer, and we already need to get a second server because our CPU is overloaded really bad. We get several e-mails per day saying the CPU is overloaded and our server has gone down twice in the last week. (BTW - we are getting our new server in 4 days)
This does not sound right - it depends on the number of hits, mysql and cgi usage, etc.

How about monitoring the server with the "top" command for a while? And "free" also gives one an indication of the available memory.

Johan