Hi all,

First post - great source of information here!

Anyway, I'm looking to start a business reselling personal websites. I have done a lot of reading here and researched many sites so I have pretty good idea what's involved.

Anyone have experience with mainly personal website hosting? Would really appreciate comments, suggestions, warnings, etc. on this type of hosting business as far as: pricing, cust. service, space allowed, etc. It seems most here cater to the business sector?

I would like to provide customers with a site building tool - Have used Site Studio so thats a big possibility. Any other suggestions? Would like to create a Do-It-Yourself environment - if thats possible! Maybe I'm dreaming?

Really enjoy this board! - thanks in advance.

If that's going to be your target audience, watch out for the newbies :)

I was shocking when I got my first personal website, loading this, running that, annoying the webmaster.

Good way to learn though.

Good luck for your venture.


Lats...

yes, be very careful of newbies... they will take a LOT of you time with support requests.

Just a tip... make sure you have a very details set of tutorials / FAQ / knowledgebase about FTP, email, etc. etc. BEFORE you start. This will save you a lot of time... you can point the newbies to the tutorials rather than having to answer the same questions over and over again.

Generally speaking, running a business with personal sites will be very difficult because they have a very low budget and will take a lot of your time (for support).

Thanks all for the input - looks like I have my work cut out for me! The idea of putting as much tutorial info on the site is a good one and plan to do that.

I'm up for the challenge, may be eating those words down the road though. This is a tough biz it seems especially after reading some of the posts.

Have dabbled with hosting off & on for a few years. Anyone a part of or remember Virtualis? Or how bout GEN? Long time ago, same thing. Was great in the beginning. But its like a curse being an entreprenuer, your thinking all the time about the biz all the time - ways to improve, ways to make $$, etc. Really its a good thing, I think as long as you set your priorities.

Rambling on again, thanks again.

I know what you mean about being an entrepreneur, there's always some new idea blossoming that inevitably takes up far more of your time and $$$ than you'd ever expected, huh :)

The personal site hosting idea is something I've often thought of doing too, so I wish you luck! You'll have to let us know here how it all goes.

Like everyone said, that market is really full of 'newbies', so there will be quite a bit of support work. I guess the easier your site builder tool is to use, the less questions you'll be getting - I'd put a decent amount of research into the different options there - just so you don't end up working with a dog that creates more problems for you than its worth!

Also, keep in mind there's a whole bunch of free journal sites out there that are becoming VERY popular (i.e. livejournal.com, diaryland.com etc), so you should maybe try to think of a valuable point of difference from their offerings. Enough to woo them to a paid account (for example maybe offer a domain name with a yearly sign up.. "Gain your own independence on the web, sign up for our Personal Plan and get your own domain name.. FREE!") or something :)

Nyeh, I don't know... just some thoughts I'd been having about hosting personal sites.