Hi there,

I need the advice of the community on this problem...
I have a web hosting business in a niche market. All my customers are businesses and would pay... My annual revenue is about $40,000 and my profits about $25,000.
Due to PaySystems, PayPal, new billing systems, school work and other annoyances, I lose $20-30,000 in revenue annually I could collect, since it is all businesses. (Ex: some have cancelled PayPal accidentally, others PaySystems, etc.) But it takes AGES to look at each individual case, adjust the database records, contact customers and get payment.

The cause of such billing problems is that I went back to University to get a degree in engineering. Its amazingly hard doing both, unless I want to fail.. even people who don't work for a living fail! I only have time to ensure that the technical aspects of the system are running fine. I don't need the extra money and passing is more important. This is why (I think) I have been successful regardless... I ensure that the customers that need the service get it.
My customers each pay over $20/month on average so I don't have a lot of technical support to deal with compared to other companies of my size. BUT my system runs special custom software, which means that its hard to find technical support companies that can deal with it well.... If that software goes down for even 30 minutes its a huge problem... I'm on call 24x7 and I hate dealing with that stress. To get work done for it all, I'm up at 9 AM and work/study until 2:30 AM non-stop.

I have 1.5 years of school left, but I don't enjoy either school or business because of the stress.

To sum: The problems:
1) I feel swamped and stressed because I'm always on call.
2) I have am close to failing school.

What should I do?

Solutions that work:
Fighting it out: Struggling and hoping I make it through. But in the end is it worth it to go through all that? An engineer starts at $40,000 per year anyhow, and with benefits. And with experience, $70,000.

Selling: I'd get a good chunk of money to help pay for expenses for the next 1.5 years, be able to do well in school and not have stress. Still, how long does it take to sell and get it off my hands? If it takes 6 months, it might not be worth it. How much would I make from it?

Common solutions and why they don't work:
REMEMBER: Every hour of my day is already taken, and if I invest in a solution that costs a lot then I might run out of money for myself. Training takes time and money (from mistakes). We've all been there. Hiring the wrong person or finding the wrong solution could mean 6 months of even more agony, or failure in my studies.

Outsourcing the server management: I use custom software. I need a company that will know what to do when it goes down. I just can't trust that if the server goes down at 3 AM, the nite-shift guy will be able to get it back up if I'm not available. If they restore improperly then all the data from the last 24 hours would be lost which is absolutely unacceptable. I fear waking up to being bankrupt.
Plus, technical agents never know anything about the custom software... I don't do normal web hosting so when they approach clients, they are baffled.

Hiring an Employee: Still won't help with late-nite uptime: I can't afford to pay people to work 24x7 even if I collected all my revenue. Plus, I tried that: employees need to be monitored if they are to be effective. I'm in class all day.

Making people "on call": When the server goes down, people on call are always late to respond or ignore it. If it goes down at 4 AM and they have work the next day, its just not happening. I can't afford to pay someone enough, and plus, I can't trust that they will be there.

Lastly, I want to mention that I would appreciate non-"duh" advice... We're all in this industry and we know that it isn't easy to just "outsource" your problems, and that you get what you pay for.

WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND?

Thanks everyone!!!!
:lovewht:

It's a tough call and I think you need to decide if you want to be an engineer or run a web hosting business and then take that route. Maybe you could qualify to be an engineer over a longer period of time with night classes or a part time degree. Not sure how it works for the country you are in.

It comes down to what you would prefer to do though. I think selling would provide enough cash to last you the 1.5 years you have left at school... but if you prefer to stay in the hosting business and feel that is the career for you then it might be worth dropping out of uni or extending the course if you still want that degree.

After reading your post I came to conclusion that you are facing problem to manage it overall, outsourcing might be a good solution here or you can even partner with a competent person who can take those responsibility very easily.

I think that StormHosts has hit the nail right on the head. You need to determine what you want to be first - a webhost or an engineer. We all know there isn't enough time in the day, or personal energy available to do both.

If you're unsure at this point and it is possible to do the degree over a longer period of time (less hours each day), that might be the route. It would allow you to keep both options viable. And, in the end, if you decide you want to be an engineer you might have a larger company to sell at the time to give yourself a nice little bonus, vacation, etc. before you start your new job.

Hmmm, my advice would be to choose one or the other. You don't seem to be able to handle both the hosting business, and your engineering degree. Sell or hand over your hosting business to someone else (you're not going to get much for your biz if your billing system isn't collecting $$$), who has the expertise to fix the billing problem and get the cashflow regular etc.

I think you may want to consider etechsupport suggestion, outsource your support, this will lighten your load up. I had exactly the same problem as you did previously. Engineering is a tough course. You can try out the outsourcing if it can't solve your problem, then you may consider selling, pity to sell, not easy to start afresh.

Thanks... these are all valuable replies. I appreciate the advice. I think partnering is a good idea too, assuming I can find someone who is competent. In terms of outsourcing, I wonder if there really are outsourcing companies that will be familiar enough with my custom system to properly manage disasters autonomously when they occur. Any other advice is appreciated.

What custom software are you using? What does it do?

It's disappointing to hear that you are struggling like that, considering that I want to do the same thing that you're saying you're struggling with. I wouldn't mind doing the hosting and going to school, I think, but it would have to be able to replace my full time job in a relatively short period of time (1 year sounds like a short period of time according to most people here).

I would imagine selling the company is your best bet, unless you can find a partner who would take over the majority of the work. Perhaps if you find someone who can do that, they could invest more time in to marketing to help the business pick up. Maybe letting some/all of your clients know of your position (if you're close enough to them, anyway) would be beneficial since it sounds like a pretty specific niche you're in.

But if I was in your position, I would probably ditch the hosting in the quickest way possible so I could go for a degree.

Trust me you can not be an engineer without putting alot of effort into studying, you may already have good grades but if you didn't have all the stress they would be higher. The real question is do you want to work for a company doing engineering for the rest of your life or do you want to own your own business and work for yourself. I ask myself that question alot and am in the same predicament you are in.

Also not sure what field of engineering you are going into but I am a senior in Electrical Engineering at University of Buffao concentrating in VLSI(Very large scale integration of circuit design) and the annual salary is not 40k a year anywhere i have seen. Starting without experience is at least 60-80k if you keep your grades up.

I would love to here how this works out for you, keep us posted.

Greetings:

IF things remain constant, sell the business.

Business customers tend to be good; and when you charge $20 and higher, then to get better quality customers, customers need support above and beyond whether a given piece of technology works or not.


Some thoughts about change
=====================

* Move away from customized software so you have more choices with outsourced server administration.

While all of our staff has bare metal experience with servers (i.e. root/administrator level, command line, et al), we've found over the years that working in a control-panel environment sets known boundaries where we can have control and quality assurance check points.

While you can have them in no-control panel and custom automation system environments, unless you have masses (i.e. 100's of H-Sphere servers for example) to test your methods, it is harder to develop "best practices" for quality assurance and control.

* Start hiring local employees that you can meet with several times per week, or take on a partner who would have a vested interest in the company (have the partner buy in --- pay $$$).

Good employees do not need to be micro-managed.

We work in an office environment at Dynamic Net, Inc., and even so, we don't hover over our employees on a constant basis.


Other
====

A large number of us, myself, included have been there in terms of being the "only" person on call 24x7x365. You have school issues, and in my case, I have family issues.

If you don't sell, this will haunt you until you can come up with alternatives (I'm stating that from having done on-call -- just me -- for several years in a row).

An automation system (non custom) might help take away some of the on-call issues; and adding staff / partner(s) may also help share the burden.


Thank you.

It would be useful to know what the custom software does.

Does it almost always break for the same reason? Could you write a manual with scripts to solve 99% of common errors with it?