Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Running a Web Hosting Business : Taking the plunge...a little advice please

[Shin]

Well after years of being a customer (usually an unhappy one) of various hosts, having my own servers (up to 4 at one point) and having bunches of various websites that I've run I think I'm finally going to give a hosting business a shot.

I'm thinking of working with various sites for hosting. I think I'll roll them out in stages, but I'm not sure of the order yet. The sites would be for shared hosting, reseller shared, and adult.

My plan is to not only keep the websites for them seperate, but different types of customers on different servers as well. Here are my tentative plans, give me your opinions...

Stage 1, server 1

Concentrate on Virtual hosting customers. Run some test campains with PPC ads, some local business ads and cheap banners I can get via these and other boards.

Get enough customers to cover the cost of the server.

Stage 2, server 2

Resellers. Work on getting some resellers. Again my plan would be to only cover the cost of the server quickly at a low price. I'd want it highly undersold to keep performance at it's best. Rely on the customers I do get to hopefully produce leads to add to the server without spending a lot of capital on ads.

Stage 3, server 3

Adult hosting. I feel this will be the most difficult and I might not even bother with it. I think that it could be quite profitable, but maybe more trouble that it's worth. Still not sure.

Stage 4, server 4, 5, 6.....

H-SPHERE setup.

From this point I'd allocate myself as a reseller on my own servers to keep things consistant and to keep the databases on one server while the actual websites on others.

So far I like the planet as the datacenter even though I've mostly used ev1/rackshack in the past. Once I go to the H-SPHERE though, I'm not sure. I want someplace that will not count server to server xfer as bandwidth used. EV1 now offers that, and i'm not sure that the planet does or not.

What do you guys think about this? Do you think it's a good idea to seperate the services on different domain names or better to keep everything in one place?

If I did this, and used say modern bill. Would I need seperate licences for each domain, or could I use the same since it'll all be the same company?

Lotta questions, answer what you want/can.

Thanks

[S-Comm]

Personally, I'd prefer optimizing all my services in simple one domain, and one website, since my business is targeting web hosting.

Dedicating a server to resellers and other to shared hosting only is a good idea. But try to not overload your server specs and performance. I was advised that.

For adult hosting, I believe there are some dedicated companies that allow adult hosting. but "legally adult". I didn't know really what they mean by legal adult hosting. But you must specify this in your TOS/Policies.