HI folks,

Well my annual consideration of this again.

I run a busy Tolkien site and we have a new site about to launch, which I think will be pretty successful. Hopefully Alexa 40K+ PR5-7 or something like that. So pretty busy at the moment.

But we also host a number of sites. About 3 PR4's and a PR5 plus about ten smaller ones. In fact just picked up a non related site which is pretty popular. I also have a few locla businesses that we host.

Now every year I think I should set up a hosting site and formalise it all. Since we just do it by word of mouth and manually at the moment. Previous good intentions means we have various licenses for everything from Modernbill, perldesk to even Ensim and UBBthreads...

I also think we have great access to the fansite market and our hosted customers would give great reviews and advertise the fact.

But....there is always one....I do not have the time to build a site and setup all the software. I am happy to do support and we have a couple of great servers with Servint, including a duel X. We also, currently, have a lot of spare BW.

What do you think. Should I just leave it and continue to pickup by word of mouth, gven my time is limited for setting it all up or should I partner with someone to handle some aspect of it and set up a hosting business?

Thanks

James

Theres its positives and negatives for setting up a partnership.

Honestly, from reading that you are running all these sites, your not gonna have to much time as hosting is a full 24/7 business. for the first couple months, even without any other major commitments it takes over your life.

if thats fine with you, try it. =) just make sure your clients are satisfied though so they dont come running here and complain.

as far as partnership goes, if your looking to partner up so you dont have to do 2 much work alone, and that is your only reason, i wouldnt. i would just take my time and set it up before partnering up and splitting profit.

You seem to have a made a success of your other ventures, so why not!! Web Hosting is a whole different ball game to fan sites and the like, but as you said, you already have customers and as long as you partner with someone that has the time and ability neccessary to run this business, you have a strong formula to make it a success.

Thanks for those replies folks.

My development time is very very limited. Like I say we are in the last month or so of a 6 month site. Plus we have another project cooking with about 50 volunteers working on it. In addtion I do some web design jobs via referrals.

Support wise I think that would be ok. I am used to dealing with them anyway and am online a lot. Plus we are always monitering things anyway as we have out own sites on these servers. We also have people in different timezones, which I have found very handy.

But as Vishost says I do not have time to put every spare moment into it.

Then again as Professor says we have a lot of things in place already. So we have customers who would recommend us ( I hope), we have huge advertising outlets since we control advertising on our own sites and our hosted clients would be happy to but links etc.

I guess I/we have been fairly successful so far. Given I started this as a construction worker and built the main site sitting at my kitchen table after work :-)

Partner wise, I am wary. I guess it would be hard to find someone to hook up with who would be reliable and share the same goals.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks

James

If you have access to new clients via referrals, what's stopping you from finding out now how many would host from you if you did become a host?

You say you host for a few local businesses. Do they pay you? Then it stands to reason that others could.

If you have cheap (free) access to an audience willing to pay for something that you can provide, you are leaving money on the table if you don't do it. How much, is for you to figure out first.

If you are thinking that without a partner you can get to a decent size web host company just because you get it setup to process signups and payments AND still do everything you are doing now. . . that doesn't seem likely.

But if you could get say... 50 people from all your busy sites to pay you $10 a month for something that costs you $50 a month... and handle an occasional support email. Sure go for it

There are times when cheap access to paying customers is enough of a "unique value proposition".

Daniel