<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

How much do your clients pay a month atm the moment?

and

Are you looking to sell everything as a package or just to sell the clients?

It sounds to me as if most, if not all, of your customers are local to your country. Out of fairness to your customers you should consider selling only to someone native to your country, or at least who can speak your language and understand the culture somewhat.

Standard replies about the value of your business will be a multiple of the monthly profit. From the information you gave, someone could figure out how to calculate the revenue, but the costs would be difficult to know.

Anyway, for the sake of your customers, I would suggest you to sell to someone in your country that you can trust. The valuation of businesses can also vary by region, and you may get more or less according to your own reputation and connections.

You could also consider selling to an ex-patriot of your country. Perhaps someone who emigrated recently, has skills for this business, and would really like an entry into business in the home country. You might consider marketing the business to the community of your nationals in other parts of the world.

Best wishes, and it sounds like you built a nice company. Too bad you feel you must sell it.

First, I don't believe anyone is going to post an offer in a public forum. Best, to respond by PM or E-mail. I regularly buy companies, but all negotiations and transactions are handled privately.

Second, anyone would need additional information to make a reasonable offer. This would include:

What country?-Language would be an issue in providing support and country would be an issue in business matters such as collecting payments, etc.

How do these clients pay you?

Where are the servers located now? How many? What type? What price?

A plus in your effort to sell is 2100 low resource customers.

A minus would be that at the time you sell, the average customer will have paid for 1/2 year of services not yet provided. That means you will have already collected approximately $50,400 for services the purchaser would have to provide. So, for example is someone were to pay you 6 months revenues ($50,400) and deduct unearned revenue ($50,400), they would really not pay you anything. This is just an example-not meant to serve as a valuation.

I think your country isn't anymore a secret for me, when I saw your alias/nickname I just mentioned that you are located in The Netherlands.
Now I am really curious about the compnay you have, I am also from the Netherlands so maybe we can have a conversation about this if you like.

It does look like a Dutch name.

If this is the case, then selling to a USA based / primarily English speaking company shouldn't be too much of a problem because most Dutch people speak and understand English well.

Ned, he clearly stated that clients were paying on an annual basis - from the number of clients x plan fee, you get get the annual revenue, divide this by twelve if you want to see what the income is per month.

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

I also think it is better to sell just your clients. It's a lot easier to administrate for an existing host. :)

Oh and by the way.. Dutch is not only spoken in the Netherlands, but also in several other countries. For those who are figuring out what 'apenstaartje' means, well it is the Dutch word for the @ sign.

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

I also would like to know what company you are from. Because else I can only geus. And if I have to guess I would say ashosting.


[IN DUTCH]
WHT bestaat al een hele tijd. En ja er zijn meer van zulke forum's. www.webhostingtalk.nl komt zeer binnenkort ook online. Verder zit t hier vol met nederlanders :).

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

Apenstaartje, my partner and I have thought this over after reading your email and have decided that we would be willing to offer you a combined 'cash-cum-kind' renumeration of $58,800 (US) for all your 2100+ clients.

Please understand that the 'cash' component of this offer will be $8400 (US) and will be paid to you via bank transfer. This works out to a one-time cash payment of $4 per client ($4 X 2100 = $8400).

Also please understand that the 'kind' component works out to be $50,400. This figure is arrived at keeping in view the six month calculation analysis offered by Incognito in this thread above.

I hope you will see with reason that this is amount of $50,400 as kind-component is the largest component in our offer because it is pure immediate profit for you, since you have already recovered this amount of money from your clients in advance. Neither you nor your clients will have to pay us any portion of the current $48 annual renewal fee before their respective current annual contracts expire. Simply put, we will be hosting all your clients for NO CHARGE (FREE) till their current annual contracts expire.

However, there is one MAJOR condition here. The cash component of $8400 will be paid to you only after six months from the date we acquire your company. I hope you agree this is a fair deal because we need to safeguard our investment too as much as possible.

Now for the other benefits each of your clients will receive + a few other important conditions:

1: We will host all your clients on an Apache web server having a minimum configuration of a Pentium 3 (800 GHz) machine with 1 GB RAM with Linux as the OS. Your clients will thus naturally notice an improvement in speed as a result.

2: Disk space and bandwidth allocations will remain the same as per your current plan during renewal. To clarify, that means each of your current clients will continue to be offered 10 MB disk space with 100 MB monthly bandwidth allocation alongwith 1 POP3 Email Account for as long as your clients stay on this plan with us. So clients will not be getting less of anything in any sort of way while they are hosted with us. More may be offered to them at our discretion at a future date because we will need to keep up with competitive trend, but under no case will we offer less then what is already being offered to your clients.

3: We also guarantee a 'freeze on price increase' to all your clients. Simply put, we promise that we will never charge more than $48 (US) per year for as long as your clients remain on this plan with us. However, we MAY DECIDE to charge LESS THAN $48 in future if competitive trends so warrant. But under no circumstance will we charge more.

4: This is another direct cash benefit to you. We are not interested in acquiring your RAQ servers. You can sell them to anybody you wish after we acquire your business and retain the entire resold value with you. We think this will definitely be a four figure dollar amount for you... again a net profit for you IN ADDITION to the 'cash-cum-kind' $58,800 amount we are offering you.

5: We also agree to charge each of your clients the same rate as you are charging them currently for extra features you currently offer. We are primarily referring to extra disk space, extra monthly bandwidth & extra POP3 Email Accounts needs.

6a: As an incentive for moving to our server, we will also provide each of your clients an additional POP3 Email Account free of cost for as long as they stay with us on the current plan. This is just a small goodwill gesture on our part which we can easily afford.

6b: Your previous posts in this thread did not mention whether you are currently offering a web mail access interface to your clients. We would be providing this facility in any case to all your clients without charge.

7: We will also bear the entire cost of moving all your clients to our server.

8a: The ownership of your current domain name will have to be transfered to us. We will pay for the cost of the transfer. However, it is important to note that we will continue to bill your clients under this domain name. We may, perhaps in future, wish to exercise the option of appointing our own in-country/in-city resellers/marketing agents to further expand our hosting business in your country/city or neighbouring countries/cities.

8b: We may also wish, if you are interested, to retain you as a consultant in order to train such in-country/in-city resellers/marketing agents. If you are able to do so, we will negotiate a separate agreement for which we will offer you a separate renumeration for conducting such training. It is up to you to accept this additional offer pertaining to training.

9: You will have to provide us with the following documents:

9a: A certified photocopy of all pages contained in your currently valid passport (certified by a local court notary/similar government official).

9b: A written declaration (certified by a local court notary/local police station/similar government body) that there are no criminal or civil cases pending against you as of the date we acquire your hosting business.

9c: A written declaration (certified by a local court notary/similar government official) that there are no pending taxes/financial liabilities/financial obligations of any sort/government fees/etc. connected with your current hosting business that we would be acquiring and that all financial obligations accrued to you before the date of business acquisition by us will be met by you without any financial or legal liability on us.

9d: A written declaration that you will not directly or indirectly be involved in the web hosting business anywhere within your country for a period of at least two years from the date we aquire your business.

9e: A written declartion that you will never attempt in any way whatsover, directly or indirectly, to lure away *IN FUTURE* any of your current clients to any other web hosting business (of which you may/may not be the actual owner) whom you will be transfering to us during our acquisition of your business.

10: We will be expecting your clients to adhere to our Terms Of Service & Privacy Policy. However, we will be creating a special temporary Terms Of Service document for all your clients after we receive a copy of your current Terms Of Service document that they are expected to adhere to at this point in time. This special temporary newly created Terms Of Service will only applying during the remaining period of their current unused annual contract. All future renewals will have to be done as per our regular Terms Of Service in force at the time of account renewal.

11: We would like to clearly state that we will be hiring our own independant legal/commercial consultant in your country/city to facilitate and supervise all necessary documentation pertaining to the acquisition of your hosting business by us. We will be bearing all costs of services rendered by such independant consultants.

Please note that this is just an offer (bid) to your request to purchase your web hosting business as outlined in this post at www.webhostingtalk.com. Some aspects (cash-component or kind-components) of this offer (bid) may be subject to change if statutory or competitive requirements necessicate so.

OUR OFFER MADE IN THIS POST WILL BE VALID ONLY TILL 29th May, 2002 (00:00 HOURS - GMT).

We hope you will find our offer quite reasonable and profitable to you. We have posted our bid in this thread like you requested. However, should there be a better bid in any respect, we think it would be only fair for you to inform us so that we may reconsider if it is worth competing against.

You wished to obtain a serious offer. We have given you our serious offer after due consideration based on what you outlined in the first post of this thread. We earnestly look forward to being given the opportunity in being finally chosen to acquire your hosting business if you should finally decide to sell it.

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

sigh!

Apestaartje,

What you actually want to get started here, is some kind of auction. But do you really think this will happen? I don't think so. If you would get a real interesting bid it would be through pm or email. There is no way they will do this in the forums. Not only they are makeing it hard for themselves as others might go over it, but the amount of money you are pointing at isn't something to be discusses about on a public forum.

Just something to think about. Would you make an offer to somebody on a public forum of lets say $100.000? I don't think so.

In my opinion there are to things you can do.
One, try to get into discussion with the people you got a pm or email from or
second, keep you business for the moment to yourself and try to find somebody through different ways. It seems like you're not sure what you want for the business yet, so lets start thinking about that and then maybe you could place on some places another thread mentioning what you want for it at the least.

just my 0.02

Regards,
Erik

What I don't get (I am Dutch too) is when you have such a profitable business you won't be able to pay your way to the US? You can go to the bank and when they see you have a profitable business they can give you a loan and you can keep your company. When your study is finished, you can continue and grow your business.
I know a big study is expensive but, unless you have a huge gap in your hand, you should be able to pay it.
And what is the URL? Why do you keep it a secret?

By the way, I post this in English so others that Dutch people can read it too :D

Jacco

Jacco,

You've got a good point there indeed. If apestaartje is makeing $100.000 a year, he should be able to pay his way through study I guess. ;)

Erik

Blikje

I was thinking the same thing. I think it would be better to keep the business and train someone to run it.

I am interested in making a serious offer. I already sent both a PM and an email.

If you would like to discuss this in more detail, please contact me either by PM or email.

I agree with Erik, in that I will not discuss large purchases with anyone over an open forum, and I don't think any serious hosting company would.

Cheers,

Craig Rose
Web-Zonic, Inc.

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>

<offer is being removed cuz my hosting company is now being sold>