Hello,

Well, for the last month I've been planning on opening a host, but I want to be sure that everything is fine to lower the chance of data loss or unhappy customers, so I've been doing allot of researching reading on the forums and looking at what clients of existing hosts complain more about. Anyway, I've got a list of stuff I already have set but I'm not sure if I overlooked anything or if anything should be changed.
I'm going to get a Reseller Plan at first, maybe move on the VPS later, this is what I'm planning on getting so far

- Reseller Plan from innohosting
- Domain & SSL Reseller (comes with the Reseller plan)
- Backup service from webbycart (Or should I just trust on the reseller plan's backup? They offer 1 free data restoration per month but they hold no responsibility if the backups fail.)
- WHMCS
- cPanel/WHM
- Outsourced support, I can't really do in-house support right now.
- Advertising on a few sites, not via adwords or anything, also some local advertising, I was thinking of making deals with local website designers to let me host the sites they design or something.
- Domain + Website
- SSL Certificate
- Legal documents such as TOS, AUP, still thinking of a SLA though.

I was thinking of adding a forum, but I've read here on WHT that a dead forum gives a bad impression, so maybe I should wait till my clientbase grows? some advice on this would be appreciated..

Another thing is overselling, should I oversell or not? Ofcourse when I see that I'm reacing qouta I'll get more space, but is it worth risking the HD's filling up? You never know when suddenly 50% of your users get the urge to fill up all their space in a day. But then again, not overselling may probably mean having very little profit.. any advice?

That's all, =)

My only advice is not to oversell. :)

I have had more problems with CPU/Memory usage than HD/BW.

I have regretted reseller accounts before, but I have some of my clients on my cheap reseller account because their sites aren't resource intensive and I'd rather keep their simple sites from taking the blow from a database intensive script.

Allways rent or buy a extra dedicated server with enough of storage.
and dont forget to make daily and weekly backups for your clients.
In case of harddrive failure you can put the backups back on another VPS node
Maybe adding 1 hotspare server just in case on fails yiou can transfer the backups to that node with a few mouseclicks. (virtuozzo with cpanel whm)

Instead of forum you could use like faq page.

I'm not going with a dedi yet, I'm just going to start with a reseller, and yea, backups will be made for sure, especially since that whole sellwhm thing.

That's right, start with a reseller plan and build your self up from that. When you get enough customers to pay your monthly server bill and make a decent profit without the overhead that's when to move to a dedicated server. That's my 2 cents.

All the best,