I want your input based on a scale out of 10 on what is the likelihood of moderate to major success with a hosting company based on these principles:
-99 % uptime (I mean it)
-Responsive and knowledgeable support theme
-Flexible and cheap design options
-Wide variety of hosting options; ranging from cheap starter plans to big executive plans
-Web based mail accounts, pre installed CGI scripts, and all the other goodies
-PHP, CGI, MySQL, and all the other goodies.
-Cpanel 4
-Payments handled by 2checkout.com

Anything I missed?

Regards, future hostmaster.

moderate to major succes will depend on:

marketing
business plan
service

Basically you're saying you'll offer what just about every other new small hosting company says they will offer -- and no doubt you have every bit of the intention to do so that most do. And more than some.

So chances of success depend on whether you meet those goals. To what extent will uptime be under your control? How will the features of your "cheap starter plans" compare to everyone else's? And your "big executive plans?" Will you make money at those prices? How long before you're in the black? Can you wait that long? How will your "support theme" translate into actual support response? All the time? Who will be your support staff? How will you market your service, and how will that differentiate it from the other thousands of hosts?

Your goals are good, but your success will depend on your own ability to meet them.

P.S... Design options? Don't even bother. Run your hosting company, let other people worry about that -- don't let your support time be co-opted by design issues.

-Cpanel 4
Using CPanel is not the road to success.

Use Plesk or Ensim.

Originally posted by TGL4387DD
-99 % uptime (I mean it)

I'm glad you do, but this ain't very good.

Look: 30.5 days in a month, multiply by 24 hours. Now take 1%.
It's 7 1/2 hours downtime. I'm sure it won't go unnoticed.

Most hosts aim at 99.5%; when your network and your servers are stable, you can reasonnably hope to reach 99.8%.
It's the last fractions of a percent that cost a lot.

Originally posted by Ju-87
-Cpanel 4
Using CPanel is not the road to success.

Use Plesk or Ensim.

Sorry but I have to disagree with you on that statement. I can
think of a few companies that were very sucessful with the aid
of CPanel/WHM.

RackShack, where you're hosting, doesn't provide an SLA to all their users.

If you used RackSpace.com, although slightly more expensive, guarantees that their network will have at least 99.999% uptime and it has been proven. That means if it goes down for more than 24 seconds in any month they will refund you 5% of your hosting fees and for every additional half hour of downtime 5% more of your hosting fees up to 100% of your cost.

If you want to be considered a reliable host then you should go with RackSpace because of their network. You can't really turn and say you offer 99.999% reliability to your customers only because you need to factor in reboots etc.

Brian

You can have servers at different datacenters..Including rackshack..

RackSpace is very nice but their cheapest package is $195 for a 650mhz 30GB traffic 20GB storage...you have to host like 20 customers to get $195! How to share 30GB between > 30 customers? kinda hard..

True, but customers care more about reliability than 30 gigs of bandwidth. What percentage of users actually uses that much anyways, and if they did, why would you want to host them.

I'd rather go with a more reliable solution than a piss poor setup.

I'm not saying that RackShack is piss poor, I'm just saying on their site I don't see an SLA or 99.999% uptime.
Brian

Thats correct brian. Thats why im saying: "Get several servers from several providers" (2 or 3 servers at the beginning). This is your best decision...Evaluate your customers and depending of the kind of customer put it on your apropiate server.

Sorry about that. I see what your saying, but on my budget, and probably many others getting several servers just isn't an option, atleast for now.

Brian

This way if one DataCenter goes down, you don't have thousands of angry customers, just a few hundred or so =)

Originally posted by Ju-87
-Cpanel 4
Using CPanel is not the road to success.

Use Plesk or Ensim.

Ventures Online use CPanel, and AFAIK they've attracted quite a few customers. In fact they've just opened their own datacenter.

what about pricing? support response time? telephone support? marketing skills? no one can answer your question without knowing these.. it is a business after all