Well, I've spent the past the last 18 months preparing to open our hosting business (three of us), hopefully by or before April 1st. Talked to the accountant, have our LLC papers filed, and our sales tax license(s). We've become relatively fluent in the flavor of linux we are going to use. We've purchased our hardware, located a colocation facility, written our positioning paper, our marketing strategy, and our business plan. We've found a credit card solution and set up the bank account. We have a small number of clients to start with that we are hosting now. But the question remains: how to we determine cursory projections for growth in customer numbers in the near future?

Flushing the financials out towards two years down the line seems to be an excercise in calculated guessing. How did some of you prove to yourselves that somewhere in the future, x number of people would be hosting with your companies? Are their direct correlations of dollars spent in internet advertising methods and numbers of clients?

I own another business (a brewery), but when we started that 8 years ago, I never had this feeling of uncertainty when it came to potential beer drinkers. It seems quite a bit more nebulous in the webhosting world. I would love to hear insights on this from those of you who have had experiences tackling this question.

Thanks again for the informative forum!

For some or for most im not exactly sure but its a guessing game!

marketing takes on many forms but not all work for each company...

We are new also, we have been running website hosting for around 2 years but not on a Private site level, more small medium sized business area!

After many investments we have only gained 20 or so new clients via diffrent marketing tactics not including offline media...

It is expected that the Hosting industry will grow another 14 Million by 2004, All we are hoping is that we get on the band wagon and take a share of that market!

Any other information you can pm me!

regards

Glad to see I am not alone on that one. All I guess I am looking for is about 7/10000ths of a percent of that growth figure :) .

Thanks for the reply.

Jeff