My task is to do some research on how to implement this plan and to get an idea on the growth potential on such an endeavor.

Any advice or links to resources would be very helpful. I have been putting together notes based on my observations from the forums and a lot of the hosting sites that I have visited.

Thanks in advance for all of your help. :)

best ones: google and webhostingtalk.com :))) search it....

Well, you really leave no detail. Will you be buying a server, starting with a reseller account, etc. Do you want to start small, or start big?

Plan to sell 5 GB's of space for $2 a month, of 200 mb's of space for $5 a month, etc. More details would help, as the initial post is quite vague.

I am sorry I realized after I posted yesterday that I was a little vague. The company has been around for about 15 years and isp/web hosting has been around for going on 11 years. We have been fairly successful on a local level providing t1, Co-Location, Data Storage, Remote Server Backups, application development, hardware, etc.. We do some web hosting now but it is mostly dedicated server clients and we have about 200.

We have been successful locally, we have never handled any clients outside of 50 miles from here. The owner wants to start expanding and offering shared/dedicated hosting nationally/internationally. Hardware wise we are more than adequate for a while at least and we have the capital if we need to expand the server side of things.

I have been doing research on Google, looking into Google adwords btw, but since many of you have been web hosting players for many years, I wanted to get advice from you as to how to expand.

I am not naive enough to think that just because we have done well locally that we can just plop a site up and expect money to just roll in for hosting accounts. I have already talked to the owner about finding a unique perspective, but what are some of the other challenges?

What has been your biggest hurdles with national clients, obviously communication is not the same as being able to go over there and help them work out problems.

What about marketing? We have never really had to advertise, we have one full time salesman but the hosting side of the business has really grown itself in a lot of ways. Now we are looking for a little more aggressive growth.

Well hopefully that is enough details to get some discussion going, thanks so much for your time.

I have heard some of you comment about the market being saturated and at the same time I hear a lot of people comment that the entrance of Goggle into the hosting market won't hurt people that are in niche markets.

So would you say that a hosting business could still do well and compete if they find a niche?