I was just wondering if there is any money left in webhosting. It seems that all these resellers have saturated the market (no offense). O yeah and one more thing. Is there a way to measure how much bandwidth a client is using?

Nope no money left ;)

Way too many resellers etc...

BTW just use a control panel to monitor BW etc..

www.plesk.com
www.cpanel.org

Yes, there is barely any money in this biz. If you are trying to track, the bandwidth usage of a client, use mrgt most control panels interact with it anyways, to give you statistics of usage.

Its not as easy as it appears if you want to survive the long haul. A lot people think they can just lease a cheap server with a control panel and they are instantly a host. Those people soil what could be an otherwise respectable business. The internet just makes it too easy for anyone to hide behind a keyboard and call themselves a business.

Jag, great analysis ;)

But how do you describe a business?

Originally posted by Jag
Its not as easy as it appears if you want to survive the long haul. A lot people think they can just lease a cheap server with a control panel and they are instantly a host. Those people soil what could be an otherwise respectable business. The internet just makes it too easy for anyone to hide behind a keyboard and call themselves a business. Very very true.

I believe there is still to be money to be made from the industry.. However, the majority of clients that you will get initially will be newbies or people who are looking for a better host after having a bad experience with another.

There are always spots for a company that offers superiod service and customer support.
Nowadays, service means everything..

ps. there are apache module that counts traffic and generates reports.. can't remembet the name..

Originally posted by apollo
There are always spots for a company that offers superiod service and customer support.
Nowadays, service means everything..

ps. there are apache module that counts traffic and generates reports.. can't remembet the name..

service means everything but the clients want it for next ot nothing.

Originally posted by whw
service means everything but the clients want it for next ot nothing.

You attract the clients you deserve :D
There are still many clients around paying way more than the typical low end WHT visitor

Don't be affraid of "newbie resellers". I think the future for web hosting is very promising. If you provide quality service, you will do just fine.

There's always room for quality service and support driven hosting.

In the dedicated/colo space, we've been profitable.

I would never get into the virtual hosting business to try and make a profit, but that is my opinion.

We target people willing to pay a fair amount for quality support and service. The much over used but oh so true statement of "you get what you pay for" applies to not only the hosting world, but just about everything in life.

Cheap, Fast, and Good. Pick 2.

Tom

In all actuality, this is just a web hosting boom. In about 3-5 years only a certain number will remain and the industry will level itself out.

There really is no profit in the $3/month hosting...

But I beleive there is still some room for upper level shared hosting, and specility hosting....

I think government of US and other popular countries should make a rule that 1 GB of data transfer cannot sell less than $2. It should be illegal if 1 GB data transfer costs $.50 cents or something like that. All plans should be something like splashhost.com and mchost.com have!

Originally posted by The Prohacker
There really is no profit in the $3/month hosting...

But I beleive there is still some room for upper level shared hosting, and specility hosting....

:eek: There's Not?? :eek:

Let's consider this "Mini Business plan"

Step 1 Rent a $79 / month Cobalt Raq - Expense $79.00
Step 2 Sell 200 hosting packages at $3 per month - Income $600.00

Step 3 Gross Profit $521.00 Per Server That's $6,252 per year!!

oh yell For Repeat=10 Goto Step 1 That's $62,520 per year!!

Final Step....... Tell your boss to "Take this job and shove it, I's ain't working here nomo" :D

I thought I'd just post to say I'm completely ignoring the comments of HostDealer. I think it might have been a bad attempt at humor but, I don't really know....



btw.. No money in hosting go away :D...

Originally posted by raq4less


:eek: There's Not?? :eek:

Let's consider this "Mini Business plan"

Step 1 Rent a $79 / month Cobalt Raq - Expense $79.00
Step 2 Sell 200 hosting packages at $3 per month - Income $600.00

Step 3 Gross Profit $521.00 Per Server That's $6,252 per year!!

oh yell For Repeat=10 Goto Step 1 That's $62,520 per year!!

Final Step....... Tell your boss to "Take this job and shove it, I's ain't working here nomo" :D


Then don't forget the cost of the tech, support staff, sales staff, unless you wanna do a one man show :D

Then figure in how much time your going to have to spend helping each of the $3/month customer...

And don't forget misc business expenses, taxs, etc...

And this doesn't figure in cost of advertising to get those 200 clients...

So in the end, you'd be luckly to get $350/month extra for all your work... Wooohoo big profit :D

There is money - if you all shut down your hosting operations for me :o

If you offer good support, you can retain your clients - the problem is just getting your clients - advertising rates are way to high for hosting. Hit the local markets hard - they don't know any better.

Originally posted by raq4less


:eek: There's Not?? :eek:

Let's consider this "Mini Business plan"

Step 1 Rent a $79 / month Cobalt Raq - Expense $79.00
Step 2 Sell 200 hosting packages at $3 per month - Income $600.00

Step 3 Gross Profit $521.00 Per Server That's $6,252 per year!!

oh yell For Repeat=10 Goto Step 1 That's $62,520 per year!!

Final Step....... Tell your boss to "Take this job and shove it, I's ain't working here nomo" :D

You know, I can open up a restaurant, a clothing shop, a cell phone place, etc. and make millions of dollars too. But reality is, where in the world are you gonna get all those clients? That to me is the hardest part. With thousands of hosts already in the market I don't know how big a piece of the pie a newcomer can expect.

I agree. There's money to be made, but the hard part is FINDING customers. If you can get 500 customers.. then you're doing ok.

But many people have a lot of trouble in this area... the market is just way too overcrowded with people offering the whole world for $3 per month.

If anyone hits on a secret to getting customers.. then they will be rich.

Many web hosting companies are trying to find the secret formula for obtaining an enormous amount of clients within a short period of time. The basic laws of logics tell me that you'd need to come up with a unique idea to increase your number of clients dramatically. Due to a lack of creativitity many lazy people are in the search for a magic formula which enables them to bypass that step.

But it won't work.

Obtaining small numbers of clients is no big secret - Eat a cake of patience and drink a sip of marketing and hopefully you'll do fine.


just my 2 cents

Originally posted by raq4less


:eek: There's Not?? :eek:

Let's consider this "Mini Business plan"

Step 1 Rent a $79 / month Cobalt Raq - Expense $79.00
Step 2 Sell 200 hosting packages at $3 per month - Income $600.00

Step 3 Gross Profit $521.00 Per Server That's $6,252 per year!!

oh yell For Repeat=10 Goto Step 1 That's $62,520 per year!!

Final Step....... Tell your boss to "Take this job and shove it, I's ain't working here nomo" :D


Uhh, right. Now you have 2000 customers to support. Most likely they will all be snot picking, pee-brained idiots who don't know the difference between PERL and a Pearl. Let's say 5% of your customers require some type of support every day. That's 100 inquiries. Even best case, it takes you 5 minutes to resovle every issue, and you never take a break, you are working 8.33 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year - just to cover support.

Never mind actually having time to bill your customers, update your company web site, spend time with the wife, kids, tend to the house .....

Now - if you do it the right way .... charge each customer $15/mo.

Since you're now charging decent rates, you can afford a real server, with real RAM, RAID, SCSI drives, in a real data center, with real multi-homed bandwidth and people who are really there 24/7 to push buttons and help you fix your server when its broken. So now you spend $500/mo on your server, but you can fit 500 sites on it.

500 X 15 = 7500/mo gross
-500 Server Fee
-500 Misc Expenses
-1500 Part Time Tech

Net: $5000/mo or 60K/yr.

Now you have 1 server - so you will have less problems in general. You have 1/4 the number of customers, and they will be more educated customers. So, you'll have maybe 20 who need attention any given day. You can delegate most issues to your tech, who will be helping you out 20 hours/week and now you can spend most of your day building the business (working on customer relationships, web site modifcations, marketing, etc etc etc) and when you feel like kicking back, you have the liberty of doing so.

If you manage to fill up 10 servers, with 500 customers each, all paying you $15/mo, you'll be grossing $900,000 a year.

Set your sights high, and you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish .....

Too bad both scenarios are flawed. That $3 client wants far more than a simple RAQ can give them, thats just a fact. You wont find 2000 clients to fit the low end RAQ and your talking constant abusers, scripts, the works...

In the second scenario, you will never fit 500 $15 accounts into a server. Clients demand the world these days and all for $10 or less. Its sad but so very true. And for that $10 they want 300+ mb space, tons of bw, and the works. You might actually get 250-350 clients on a server though.... I doubt they will average out to $15 per client though.

I would say scenario two is more accurate but still wont cut it in todays high value cheap market. Lets not forget the key ingredient in both scenario's though, advertising. Its costly and without you have no startup. You have to have a client base before you can be sustained from "word of mouth" advertising.

Originally posted by Jag
In the second scenario, you will never fit 500 $15 accounts into a server. Clients demand the world these days and all for $10 or less. Its sad but so very true. And for that $10 they want 300+ mb space, tons of bw, and the works. You might actually get 250-350 clients on a server though.... I doubt they will average out to $15 per client though.

I would say scenario two is more accurate but still wont cut it in todays high value cheap market. Lets not forget the key ingredient in both scenario's though, advertising. Its costly and without you have no startup. You have to have a client base before you can be sustained from "word of mouth" advertising. [/B]

Heh. Our cheapest virtual hosting plan is $20/mo. And people are still signing up. Our cheapest resold account is $10/mo. We don't do any advertising at all, and we still have people signing up. Maybe my logic wasn't so flawed :D

It wasnt a target towards anyone saying it can't be done, we still have people signing up for $15 and even the $35 plans. But Ive seen a great deal of people trying to sell the world for under $10 and new clients today beleive thats how things should be. You dont count anyways, windows hosting always costs more than linux/unix.

Originally posted by Jag
You dont count anyways, windows hosting always costs more than linux/unix.

LOL - That is true :D

Although I haven't found it yet, I believe there is money to be made if you stick to your values, and don't let the $10 a year guys change the way you do business.

I fit around 750-1000 clients per server,


This is a FREEBSD server, not a unstable linux server who can not handle tcp packets correctly.

You can fit more then 1000 clients on a freebsd server, best.com (now verio) use to put over 10,000 clients on each server.

And yes, they used freebsd. Linux will never handle 10,000 client though.

Hosting FAQ:

Do you know?

1) Most hosts are just getting 30 new clients per month

2) on an average of number, each client use less than 500MB bandwidth per month

3) with 120 accounts and 200 domains on our server, the server load is just at 0.6 to 1 (peak hours)

4) Most hosts are run by kids, youngers and kids

Originally posted by dk2002
[B]Hosting FAQ:

Do you know?

1) Most hosts are just getting 30 new clients per month!

We're finding that usually with 2 weeks, each new client brings across 2 to 5 additional domain names. Sourcing new clients is only a small part of it nowadays. There must be some awesome churn rates out there, because there are nowhere near as many new clients (as in "I have just registered my first domain name" type clients) than there are satisfied clients, and their word of mouth referrals, bringing about a healthy amount of work.

Cheers

Gary

We're getting 70 new clients per month too, but the fact is most hosts are just getting around 30 clients per month :spiny:

what is this hosting faq and where are you getting this info from?

Originally posted by dk2002
Hosting FAQ:

Do you know?

1) Most hosts are just getting 30 new clients per month
Really? Saying Most hosts implys what, 90%? I looked around but haven't seen any polls

2) on an average of number, each client use less than 500MB bandwidth per month
This may be true for your company but that doesn't mean all companies. I tend to agree however that mosts clients don't even use half of the alloted bandwidth.

3) with 120 accounts and 200 domains on our server, the server load is just at 0.6 to 1 (peak hours)
Load on a server has everything to do with what kind of server specs and what kind of clients you have. Which is why I have to disagree with Jag. True a PIII 866Mhz machine can't hold 500 clients, FreeBSD or Linux. But if anyone says one can't fit 500 low resource clients on even a dual PIII 1Ghz, I'd disagree.

4) Most hosts are run by kids, youngers and kids
This sounds a bit condescending. Are you saying "youngsters" can't run a hosting company? I'm 21, am I therefore "too young"? I know 15 year olds that could easily run circles around 90% of the people here when it comes to managing and trouble-shooting a linux box, but apparently, you have to be 30 to start a hosting business...

Originally posted by comphosting
3) with 120 accounts and 200 domains on our server, the server load is just at 0.6 to 1 (peak hours)

Load on a server has everything to do with what kind of server specs and what kind of clients you have. Which is why I have to disagree with Jag. True a PIII 866Mhz machine can't hold 500 clients, FreeBSD or Linux. But if anyone says one can't fit 500 low resource clients on even a dual PIII 1Ghz, I'd disagree.

Err, um.. I never said you couldnt fit 500 accounts on a server. I said you couldnt fit 500 of todays $15 accounts on a server when you look at what clients expect for that $15. You can cram 1000 cheap $3 sites on just about anything, I think I have a toaster around here somwhere that we can test that theory on. :D

With the right business plan, steady growth, and *realistic* prices, there is plenty of money to go around. Our lowest priced account is $20/month, and it comes with only a small fraction of what the $3/month hosts offer. Most clients use our $40+/month accounts, and use maybe 100MB disk space, and maybe 2 GB/month traffic max.

Throw in ecommerce software (ie not free or Miva), a la carte options, etc... and the profit is there. The key is steady growth, great support, and referrals. We don't have 10,000 clients, but I'll take 1500 and $600,000+ a year anyday :)

John C.