I've been looking into webhosting for probably over a month now and I've decided to take it up - probably more as a hobby thing at first.

However, one thing I'm worried about is that when things start becoming more serious - how many customers can one person handle if they offer a high level of service? I need to know so I can equate this into the cost of my plans. If I can only handle say 100 customers, then I would need to charge a little more than if I could say handle 200 customers, before getting someone else aboard. So unless I just want to provide for my pet bird, this is something important I need to know.

Those of you with experience, how many customers are you able to handle by yourself?

All the best,
- Kurieuo.

It all depends on who your customers are. The majority of my customers rarely ever contact me. The few that do, are the ones that are in contact with me often, almost on a daily basis. If you sign up enough customers that you cant handle them all yourself anymore, you should be able to afford to get someone to help out. If you cant then you are either charging waaaaaaaay too little, or you dont really have enough knowledge yet to be doing this. I'd say that you should estimate that you will only be able to handle 50-75 customers on your own. You should be able to handle more but its better to estimate on the side of profitability rather than be sitting there crossing your fingers that you'll have the money to pay all your bills at the end of the month. If you end up not having to hire someone after that, invest some extra money into new features or account upgrades for your clients:)

Hello,

As ServerSonic mentioned, you may be able to handle about 50... And not everyone will contact you too. But some may contact you enough more than those 50 clients. 50 e-mail from same person in same day :)

There are some companies such as bobcares.com and they provide you with 24/7/365 technical support. They will be your support@yourdomain.com and will answer to all your client's inquiries. An non of your clients will ever mention this.

Its like ticket based system, which you can even track the comminucation which been made between your client and the bobcares.com company.

They answer to the e-mails within an hour... A friend of mine is working with them and she's quite happy though.

Working part-time you should be able to handle 300 to 500 accounts by yourself. However, webhosting a good hobby does not make. If you charge your customers, they'll expect service regardless of the day of the week, a well-maintained server, and other silly little things like that.

Thanks everyone. 300-500 part-time sounds like too many, but I really can't see how else some hosts who charge so little can have the time to survive.

Bobcares is also a good idea - I'll probably make use of them when my host does grow. I'll be able to evaluate expenses better now I think.

- Kurieuo.

kurieuo,

We average about .2 tickets per client per month. So, if you had 100 clients, you could expect about 20 support tickets to come in that month (we have a lot more than 100 clients, so this ratio may not work the same untill you have more clients). We consider a ticket to be a specific problem to solve, not an email. (There are some tickets that take 6 or 7 emails from each side before they are completed. Of course some others are only 1 email and very easy to fix).

With this ratio, and supposing that you have good knowledge of webhosting and server administration, I think that you can handle 700 to 1,000 clients by yourself (full time). With 1,000 clients, you could expect about 200 inquiries during each month, which works out to 10 per day (if you work 20/30 days for the month). 10 tickets per day should definitely not take you more than 8 hours, and would probably leave you with enough spare time to do all of your server administration tasks.

With 1,000 clients, you should be making enough money to not have to worry about the expense of hiring on some more people (unless you offer hosting for $2/year :rolleyes: ).

brav0 - I disagree, I think webhosting makes a great hobby, as long as your clients know you consider it a hobby and not a business! ;)

Thanks mpope for the great reply - you've helped lots in providing me with some idea of what I could expect.

Kind regards,
Kurieuo.

Off topic but....

I know some company owners who are handling everything on their own - so what they do is limit the amount of customers but provide to those who are paying them a great service...

That could be a good solution..