Web Hosting Talk : Advertising Forums : Web Hosting Related Offers & Requests : Web Hosting Companies And Clients For Sale or Purchase : Small Free Hosting Biz for Sale ~$200 Revenue per Month

[SamBarrow]

I've been running my free host for about 2 years no (on and off) mostly as a hobby type of thing. We re-launched in late 2011 after a temporary shutdown, and growth has been steady since then.

Lately the design/development part of my business has taken off in a big way so I'm trying to focus a bit more on that side of things, therefore I'm looking to sell off some of my hosting stuff.

We offer a free plan and a $9.99 per year plan (same as the free plan + unlimited domain names). We also use the site to funnel people over to our paid hosting company, but the signups over there have been pretty low. Maybe 2 or 3 a month, but I couldn't say for sure since we haven't set up proper tracking for this.

All revenue below is strictly through the free hosting division (special package and domain regs). No signups at our paid hosting division are included in these reports.

Revenue

January 2012 - $224.84
February 2012 - $269.80
March 2012 - $124.94
April 2012 - $174.85
May 2012 - $239.81
June 2012 (as of the 19th) - $99.91

As you can see it fluctuates. Averages out to about $188 per month. The reason it's down in June is (probably) because I disabled free hosting signups while I decided what direction I would go with this thing.

Stats

- 54 Paid Accounts at $9.99 per year.
- 22 Domains Registered at $19.99 per year (through Resell.biz).
- 19,000 Clients in WHMCS.
- 3,000 Active Hosting Accounts.
- 2,912 Forum Members.
- 13,939 Forum Posts.

Community

I log on to the forums no more than once a month to check things out. The community is very active and volunteers handle 99% of the support requests. The only thing I'm needed for is payment handling (every couple days) and server issues (rare).

We currently have about 10 volunteers but not all of them are around often. There's a core group of about 3-4 of them who are on pretty much every day.

I pay my top volunteer a hundred bucks a month; he does order processing and domain changes and manages the rest of the team.

We process all orders manually and use MaxMind - absolute necessity for free hosting. We also have a custom written script that looks at the MaxMind output and cancels orders based on distance parameters. Saves us a ton of time.

Software

The site is comprised of a static HTML home page (template design) and instances of WHMCS and IPB.

WHMCS is modified both with a Munin graph plugin and an inactivity plugin, described below. IPB has a custom theme and widget for the Munin graphs through WHMCS.

Inactivity System

The reason there are so few active accounts in relation to clients is because of our inactivity system.

With free hosting, about 4/5 of your signups never actually use their accounts. To combat this, we put together a custom written system that purges these accounts based on both DNS lookups and whether or not the user has replaced the default index page. It's pretty advanced, gives multiple notices, then suspends, notifies again, then terminates. And it's written in a way that these time parameters can be easily changed. It's implemented as a WHMCS mod and includes a hook and its own admin interface where you can exempt certain users from the checks.

Equipment

This all runs on one server. It's packed, obviously, but it actually works better than you would expect (thank you SSDs). Without the SSD however, it would be absolutely impossible.

I own this server outright, and pay $100 a month for colo (2u, 2a, 100mbps). I could probably get away with $50 for 10mbps but hey. It's at ColoUnlimited right now.

We have had occasional slowdowns in the past but nothing too serious, the server doesn't crash, stays up for months at a time. I can show monitoring graphs if necessary. It spikes sometimes but never enough to be noticeable for more than a few seconds or crash it. Our last reboot was about one month ago and was not because of any performance issue.

Server Specs

- Intel E3-1230 CPU
- 16GB DDR3 RAM
- 2x 2TB Hard Drives
- 1x 1TB Backup Drive
- 160GB Intel 320 SSD Drive (for /var)

Sale

Interested?

Make me an offer. Or email me if you'd like to see the site first.

Specify also what you need to be included. Obviously the clients, domain, web site, custom scripts, etc are bundled, but the things below are optional.

- Server (I Paid ~$2,200 in Jan/Feb)
- IPB License

The WHMCS license is not available unfortunately.

sbarrow [at] squidix.com

Important Note: It is absolutely imperative that my clients be taken care of. If I am not fully confident that they will be in good hands, I will not sell to you.

Thanks!

[SamBarrow]

Don't know how I forgot to post this.

We had AdSense for a period of time on the forums which pulled in $300+ per month. Our account was disabled (through no fault of our own). We never tried any other PPC networks, just BuySellAds.

So if you have AdSense, or know of an equivalent ad network - that can easily double/triple revenue.

Proof of this is available as well.

[Dasweb]

Went ahead and shot you an email.

[private_html]

Hi Sam, please may i ask, how much are you looking for?

[SamBarrow]

Originally Posted by private_html

Hi Sam, please may i ask, how much are you looking for?

Just taking offers at the moment. I don't have to sell, so I'd like to get a rough idea of what I can get for it first.

Thanks!

[SamBarrow]

Update.

Revenue for June is $169.85. July is $69.94 so far (as of the 10th).

Manual inactivity checks were done this week, terminated about 1,000 accounts. So ~2,000 active accounts now.

Taking the best offer I get by the end of the month.

[WireNine]

What's the domain? Traffic stats? How much are you looking for?

[SamBarrow]

Originally Posted by WireNine

What's the domain? Traffic stats? How much are you looking for?

Send me an email I'll get all that to you.

As for price I'm not picky at this point. Make an offer.

[Smart2Host]

What is your email? I am willing to offer $300 USD

[MediaServe-Troy]

Would you expect the buyer to continue to offer free hosting? A new brand we're contemplating could keep the price close to what you're charging your paid subscribers, and it would be great to start the new brand off with a few customers.

We're at the same DC so it could be a really easy move.

[Dr Anthony]

Can you please PM me details

[SamBarrow]

Originally Posted by MediaServe-Troy

Would you expect the buyer to continue to offer free hosting? A new brand we're contemplating could keep the price close to what you're charging your paid subscribers, and it would be great to start the new brand off with a few customers.

We're at the same DC so it could be a really easy move.

We would want somebody who would continue doing the free hosting, at least for the people already on there. As I said it's important that the clients (including free clients) be taken care of.

In the grand scheme of things, one server to hold them is negligible if you wanted to stop new free signups and simply offer paid. The brand itself brings traffic regardless.

[MediaServe-Troy]

Well, on the surface, I see about ~$500 (annually) in value for the paying clients, and value in the server itself if you're including it (are you?)

I don't see any value in the free hosting, but there may be enough value in the brand to offset that and keep the free hosting going. However, I would have to get an idea of the unique visitors numbers for the last few months, and an SEO report of some kind showing any top ten rankings for good key phrases.

I would also like to know the (ballpark) percentage of paid customers using more than 1GB storage, and free customers using more than 1GB storage.

If you are selling the server, I'd like to know if it's rack mounted, and if so is it 1 or 2U (or more?)

If you're not including the server, no problem there. I can migrate your clients to our own infrastructure. If you do include the server, is it easily severable from anything else you have at CoreXchange? If that's the only thing you have there, I could just take over your account and decide later whether to move the server into one of our cabinets, or leave it where it is.

[SamBarrow]

Originally Posted by MediaServe-Troy

Well, on the surface, I see about ~$500 (annually) in value for the paying clients, and value in the server itself if you're including it (are you?)

Plus a couple hundred profit on domains, yes. And we get about 15-20 new paid orders a month.

And if you have AdSense, I see no reason you couldn't bring back that $300 per month (although to get that traffic you'd probably want to keep doing the free thing).

Originally Posted by MediaServe-Troy

I would also like to know the (ballpark) percentage of paid customers using more than 1GB storage, and free customers using more than 1GB storage.

Send me an email and I'll get this to you along with traffic stats.

Originally Posted by MediaServe-Troy

If you are selling the server, I'd like to know if it's rack mounted, and if so is it 1 or 2U (or more?)

I'm not including or excluding it, there is no price set, so just make me an offer based on whether or not you want the server. Although it is probably a good idea to grab the server as well, to avoid a huge migration if nothing else. It's near new (bought in Feb).

It's a 1U supermicro 5017C-MTF.

Also, if you do not want the server, you at least need something with an SSD to support the free clients. It will not work otherwise, that I can guarantee you.

Originally Posted by MediaServe-Troy

If you're not including the server, no problem there. I can migrate your clients to our own infrastructure. If you do include the server, is it easily severable from anything else you have at CoreXchange? If that's the only thing you have there, I could just take over your account and decide later whether to move the server into one of our cabinets, or leave it where it is.

This won't be a problem either way.

[HostNIT]

Hello,

please send me NDA to dima_taranov(at)yahoo.com