can anyone give me a ballpark figure of cost to set up a webhosting service ( i have no idea what's involved at this stage) I don't want anything massive and will only use it for my own website clients - I dont' want any advanced features, pretty much just static websites and emails though I will need to be able to park domains

Depends on how many clients, running a hosting business can cost anywhere from $20 - $xxx,xxx,xxx a month depending on whether you want a server, a managed server, etc.

I mean, you could always run a hosting business off of a reseller account, but most likely you will have to spend $50+ a month.

can anyone give me a ballpark figure of cost to set up a webhosting service ( i have no idea what's involved at this stage) I don't want anything massive and will only use it for my own website clients - I dont' want any advanced features, pretty much just static websites and emails though I will need to be able to park domains


You need to define you requirements a bit better:

- how many domains?
- what kind of space?
- what kind of data transfer?


This should serve a broad indicator for you to decide on what to buy. But, normally you can start small with a reseller account and expand to a VPS or dedicated when you have a lot of clients.


For static sites and emails, a reseller account should be more than sufficient.

:lovewht:

can anyone give me a ballpark figure of cost to set up a webhosting service ( i have no idea what's involved at this stage) I don't want anything massive and will only use it for my own website clients - I dont' want any advanced features, pretty much just static websites and emails though I will need to be able to park domainsIt takes a lot of time and knowledge to setup, secure, and optimize a server - and then manage it incase something goes wrong. You may be better finding a reseller account or something similar.

Steve

Moved to Running a Web Hosting Business.

By what i can see with the way you expressed the topic you should get a cPanel reseller acount!

Start off with a $4.95/mo resellerzoom account and go upgrading as you need...

can anyone give me a ballpark figure of cost to set up a webhosting service ( i have no idea what's involved at this stage) I don't want anything massive and will only use it for my own website clients - I dont' want any advanced features, pretty much just static websites and emails though I will need to be able to park domains

Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe the OP was talking about total setup costs, not just a hosting account? If that is the case, then you need to think about things like:

Phone service
Billing software (either purchased or leased license)
Support (will you provide it, is it provided with your hosting account, or will you need to outsource it)
Helpdesk solution
Domain reseller account
There are others, but this is a good start...

David

It's really not all that expensive to setup a webhosting service for what you describe. If your clients truly are using just some simple html pages and emails then it's really rather cheap.

You can get by with the following, it's how I started out till I outgrew it.

1. Hardware
You can go to your local pc club or even large retail outlet and buy a stripped down PC, then just max it out with memory and hard drives. I already had the box, so I bought the motherboard, cpu, memory and hard drives for about $500.00, and a simple router can be had for $30-$179.00

2. Software
Choose the flavor of Linux that you wish to use. I've used Suse Linux for a long time now and it works well for me. Cost $59.00/retail boxed set
Get a free control panel that works with the flavor of linux that you chose, I use Virtualmin/Webmin/Usermin I bought the pro model which supports unlimited domains for about $99.00 They are still new so they havn't worked out what the renewal fee will be, but they are figuring last I heard to be about 1/3 of the original purchase price. Or you can use their free versions which are not quite as up to date as the pro models, but work just fine.
Remember you'll have to manage your own server so you'll have to research how to run things properly on a linux box, but it's really not difficult to do at all. I stepped into it without any prior knowledge of linux and with the help of some web forums turned my new server into a rock solid and stable server.

3. Connection
You can easily start hosting sites of what you describe on a simple business DSL or business Cable connection (I started out this way, since there was no bandwidth charges with my cable provider), when I started out my Ubber business cable connection which at the time was about $70.00/month I think at the time this had about 1.2G which was more than enough for all the mom and pop local stores websites that I was hosting.

Just remember if your going to manage your server yourself, to do your research on each software patch that comes out before applying it to your server so that you dont break something and if you do happen to break something, you'll need to be able to fix it. Not everyone is mechanically or software inclined so if your nic goes out and you lose connection you will be out of luck if you can't diagnose what is causing the outage and will obviously lose your clients. Clients drop like flys after just a couple outages of only minutes at a time. For example, if your server goes down or you lose connection for about 10 minutes just a couple times a month, you can rest assured you will lose some of your clients because they will undoubtely be looking at their website when the server outage occurs *murphys law and all*.

Also you dont need to have individual IP address's for each client, most clients dont need this unless they have plans to run a ftp server. So you'll have virtual server domains instead of individual IP addresses for each clients domain name, this saves money for you.

It's not hard or take very long to recoup your initial outlay of this small amount of money if you are hosting small websites that dont do much of anything every month to begin with.

Heck, even though I've moved on to NOC's I still have a personal server running out of my home office that hosts 200+ clients of the smaller variety just for the fun of keeping these particular clients happy by offering them personal support, the fun of keeping everything running silky smooth. My wife doesn't particularly like hearing my home office server support cell phone (I also offer the clients on my home office server other support options besides the cell phone) ring (i use one cell phone to offer support to the clients on my home office server) in the middle of the night asking what would appear to many people to be the silliest or stupidist of questions that nobody should be asking their webhost (sometimes things as simple as "how do I insert a non breaking space in a html document?")

So anyway, let's add it all up for a beginning starter webhost like what I believe your talking about

Hardware:
Build your own server: $500
Router: $100
Linux: $60.00 (or free if you want to download a version)
Control Panel: $100.00 (or free if you want to use something like ispconfig or the free virtualmin/webmin)
Basic business connection: $89.00/month (my home office server still runs on this)

Total Outlay of Cash: $849.00
Obviously if you've got an old pentium 4 2.0ghz laying around collecting dust, you can easily save some money in the hardware department and just stick in a couple 300gb hard drives and a couple gigs of ram and call it done.

Theres a couple other things to add in, like a dedicated telephone line to offer your customers support, but since they are already your customers I assume they already have a way of contacting you for support. You can continue to offer them support in this fashion, or you could get any of a number of free helpdesk software to run on your main hosting accounts domain. As far as billing solutions, I used paypal in the beginning, and just used thier re-occuring billing plans so that my clients were billed every month for their plan amount and when they cancelled, they just clicked on the cancellation button on my old website and this took them to paypal where they stopped any further billing. Once they did this I would get a notice from paypal telling me that they had cancelled the payments and I would then manually turn off their domain hosting 3 days after the end of there billing cycle, and delete the domain off the server 14 days after turning the account off (just in case they needed a copy of their site I could provide it for them, at a fee of course).

So in any event for the first month, your looking at less than $1000.00 and if your offering all the support yourself, then your monthly cost is about $90.00 if you go the route of a cable connection which is actually more than enough for small html driven websites that usually dont see much action anyway.

There are some people that will have you believe that if you dont have the latest and greatest control panel for your clients to use, then your a nobody and a boob and will never get anywhere. But I firmly dont believe this. I've hosted my sites before I got into webhosting and had access to some of the best custom built control panel software in the industry with every bell and whistle you could imagine. And what it really boiled down to was eye candy, the majority of the time I was using the email function to add, remove email address, or use it for the webmail option, and I was occasionally using the filemanager options, but mostly I was using the stats program that was built into their control panel software package. So you dont really need whatever might be considered to be the top of the line control panel to start out, or ever in my opinion. There are a couple control panels that have eye candy appeal and function perfectly well for free or at a minimal cost to you the host.

As far as billing software itself, well I use to use Quicken to keep track of the clients I had when I started out, this was very easy to use and did everything I needed it to do. All I had to do was enter in some data every month and know exactly where I stood.

Goodluck,

I really wouldn't recommend doing web hosting using a business DSL line. The transfer rate on those is so low, and with the love of graphic rich sites and broadband connections nowadays, its upstream would get saturated pretty quickly. IMO, I would absolutely advise not to do that. Sure you could do it, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

My advise would be to do research... not just of hosts and ways to do things, but research how much you can invest per month. Figure out your budget first, and then find what fits into your budget. Lowest start up costs would be a reseller account with a reputable hoster. Higher up, you have VPS, dedicated servers, and colocation.

Here is something that should get you started. The prices are average or above average. You should be able to go cheaper, but at least that might give you an idea.

One-time Fees
Billing/Signup/Helpdesk $169.99 (WHMCS)

Helpdesk Tutorials $44.99 (cpanel Flash Tutorials from WHMCS)

Merchant Account $49.00 (Setup Fee)

Support Outsourcing $25.00 (Bobcares Starter Plan)

SSL Cert $14.95 (EV1 QuickSSL)

Banners/Ads $112.00 (Bannersmall.com)

Domain Name $8.95 (Enom)

Website Template $100.00 (Template Monster, Sitepoint, etc.)

Business License $$100.00

Other $150.00

Recurring Fees (monthly)
Support Outsourcing $100.00 (Bobcares Starter Plan)

Reseller Hosting $35.00 (upgrade as needed)

Merchant Account $25.00 (Statement + Authorize.net)

Cable / DSL $45.00

Other $25.00

Forgot to mention - my list does not include ANY advertising cost. That is a complete different topic and you can go with zero $$ to $xxxx.xx easily - depending on your budget. My list only includes basic infrastructure to be able to do business.

Christoph