In the hosting arena usually what amount of signups are with paypal? would I be losing a lot of customers if I did not accept paypal? Those hosts who accept both paypal and credit card what are the ratios like?

I can't speak for others, but I get 20% of my payments thru paypal.

Over 90% of my orders are paid via Paypal. You would be losing out on a lot as other payment methods such as money order, bank transfer, Alertpay, etc. aren't as popular as Paypal. In my opinion, if you don't offer Paypal your going to have a hard time making money, let alone pay for your servers.

If I accept credit cards directly is it likely to lessen the losses made by not accepting paypal?
also anyone knows of any site other than 2co (I heard they are not good for hosting) who can help accept paypal?

It would not. We take credit cards, and still have a large demand for PayPal. PayPal is easy to setup if you have something like whmcs, whmautopilot, modernbill, awbs, etc. The costs aren't really that much higher compared to taking credit cards. You should really try and offer your customers as many avenues to pay as possible.

I would use paypal as well as credit cards otherwise you will lose sales, depending on your target market.

I would go with providing access to PayPal as well. While you may allow customers to use credit cards, you are asking them to trust your site with their information.

Most likely somebody would be willing to trust their information with PayPal over your website because of the status and authority that PayPal has built over the years.

Like canishosting said, you should really be offering as many payment options as you can. As long as the service that you are offering doesn't cost more then customers using it, there shouldn't be any reason why you shouldn't supply that service for your customers.

I was afraid this was the response I was going to get, but no matter as my target market will be local my main customers will not be affected (doesn't mean I won't be looking for international customers as well).

Unfortunately where I am we only have send only accounts for paypal.... so can't do much.

Anyone use Plimus.com?

Over 90% of my orders are paid via Paypal. You would be losing out on a lot as other payment methods such as money order, bank transfer, Alertpay, etc. aren't as popular as Paypal. In my opinion, if you don't offer Paypal your going to have a hard time making money, let alone pay for your servers.

I disagree with that statement... Although it may be vital for your business it may not be for others.

FOr example, we don't accept PayPal, we have not lost any business as a result. Nor are we loosing money, nor are we having problems paying for servers...

If we did accept PayPal we would only accept it from verified accounts, meaning that they would have to register a card anyway so I doubt that people would have any problems paying by Credit / Debit card directly.

It really depends on who your targeting and what works for you :)

I'll suggest you not to ignore PayPal as a method to accept payments. You can get up to 20% of all payment from PayPal users.

Anyone use Plimus.com?

Thanks, looks like a good system to look into.

I offer credit and paypal but have noticed a dramatic decrease in paypal customers lately.