HI
This is my first post to this board. (clap! clap)..

I have been lurking around the forums for awhile now and have decided to go into the web hosting business (wow).

Now, what I REALLY want to know from the sysops are:

Question 1.
If you offer an account for say 10gb b/width at $10-15. And say you have 100 customers. How many of them would actually utilize that 10 gigabytes of data transfer per month? Would it be say 5% or 15% of your customers that fully utilize all of that traffic or would it be more?
<< note: can only people who run a web hosting service answer this >>


Question 2.
Same as above but for diskspace.

Question 3.
How many accounts can be fitted on an average Pentium III, 40gig HD, 30 I.P's? e.g. 200, 300?

Question 4.
How do I let my customers get instant activation + automated credit card verification of the accounts? (I live in Australia)

Question 5.
I am looking for someone who is great with technical support, who would like to work at home with ICQ or AIM or Livehelper and e-mail. Wages neg but starts at $400/500USD per week. Mail your resume to universal2001@n2mail.com

THANK YOU! I appreciate all your help and I look forward into taking over your business and stealing all your customers in the future.. j/k (hehehe) :D

1) 5% is our usage ratio, out of all the bandwidth allocated to all of our accounts 5% is actually being used this month.

2) 11% is disk space ratio, out of all the space allocated to accounts 11% is actually being used this month,

3) You haven't specified how much memory or the processor speed, memory has the biggest effect on performance, for 200-300 clients you are going to want at least 512Mb RAM and is some are using PHP/CGI/MySQL then you are going to want to start thinking of 1Gb of RAM.

4) Billadmin.com has a program that allows you to bill credit cards and set-up accounts, it adds the accounts to a queue so that you can check the details against known spammers and fraudsters etc. before you set them up.

5) No idea.

I wish you good luck with your business.

universal,

Contgrats on deciding to get into this business. One piece of advice: Before you do anything else, please make sure you go out and get a webcam so that your spouse/children can remember what you look like :).

1. 5%, if that on most months.

2. It depends on whether or not you are going to cound mail spool into their quota. Right now, just in strait disk space, our customers use about 10% of their quota (this is across 6 servers). However, if you throw the mail spool in there, that number jumps to about 30%.

4. Most cc processing companies have some sort of automatic processing available to you. So it depends on who you plan on opening your merchant account with.

5. Sure, I'll take that job, I promise not give bad service intentionally, and then send your customers over to us :).

We just got some funding from our investors so I hope we can put his $500,000 to use and buy 3-4 servers from VDI, UltraSpeed, VenturesOnline or most likely Serverhost.

Has anyone heard of problems with Serverhost or Ventures Online?

I was also thinking of advertising my new web hosting business on our web developers only portal site which has something like 400,000 unique developers per month.. Maybe that will give me an early start along with the investment money to advertise on Hostsearch and all those sites (and perhaps bribe them for awards) (heheH).

Oh well..I appreciate all your help. Thank you once again!

VenturesOnline acutually gets their servers from VDI.

I have never used ServerHost, but they have very affordable prices.

--
Matt Kaufman
http://www.hostspin.com
Contact sales@hostspin.com for dedicated servers!

Well we dont buy our servers from VDI we buy our own and we have racks at vdi and just colocate them there. :)

I suggest you go with VDI.
All of the Alabanza people are moving there.
I've been very happy with VDI, they have the best control panel on the market which your customers will love it.
Their prices are affordable and they are reliable.

I'm curious, is alabanza still in business?

Originally posted by SK
I suggest you go with VDI.
All of the Alabanza people are moving there.
I've been very happy with VDI, they have the best control panel on the market which your customers will love it.
Their prices are affordable and they are reliable.

I'm curious, is alabanza still in business?

Yes they are very much in business. From what I hear, there support and plans are great.