Loaded Question

This is in fact, quite the loaded question. You cannot answer this question in a few short lines (and I defy anyone to try) without missing 100 important things. In fact, I think it’s almost impossible to answer at all. There are just too many things you need to learn as you go. You don’t need to dive in head first, but you can’t keep dipping your toe in the water.

One big question is: by web hosting do you mean shared hosting? Dedicated hosting? Both? Or are you a bit more spicy in your approach to life, offering the niche services. Shoutcast, Game servers, VoIP servers, etc.

Depending upon the answer, I can take this post a million different directions. So I am going to try to sum up the basics, and let you find out the rest for yourself.

Business Savvy

This may seem obvious, and you may want to punch me in the face right now, but you do in fact need some sort of business savvy. You need to know how to handle money, a budget, customers, and pretty much anything any other business requires. Hosting, much like anything else, requires a starting strategy.

Thought needs to be put into how you are going to enter a very saturated market. How you are going to market yourself. Image, brand, and personality are of key importance in the hosting world. So thought needs to go into each aspect of presentation, perhaps even before thought goes into hardware or anything like that.

Plan of attack

There are basically three ways you can start a hosting company.

1. You get a reseller with some shared hosting company
2. You get a dedicated server or two (or three) from a datacenter
3. You colocate your own hardware at a datacenter

You need to decide what works best for you. But I will tell you straight up that option 1 is a waste of your time and money. You can never do more than break even with a reseller. And we are talking low hundreds here, if that. Reseller accounts are just a waste of time. If you don’t own at least one server, you are not doing it right.

Now some might be going “Uh, forgetting VPS?” right now. But no, no I am not forgetting about VPS. Starting a company with a lone VPS is silly. Just as silly as starting a company on a reseller account. The only people who do this are the 13 year olds who think that all you need is a hosting template from MonsterTemplates to be successfull.

So that leaves us with dedicated servers, and colocated servers. Here is where the ‘experts’ split. Some say it’s best to start with dedicated servers and then graduate to colocated servers. But in my opinion, it’s best to start with a colocated server. Since the hardware is payed for, all you pay for is space power and bandwidth. This leaves more money for staff, design, upkeep, licensing, and the hundreds of other places money is drained from you in the hosting world.

Platform

Now that you have decided what hardware you are going to start with, you need to know how you are going to manage this hardware. I suppose we can start at a very base line here and ask, what OS do you want to go with?

The windows market is still ripe for the taking believe it or not. There is a reason for this however, with a windows server all you really want to be running is game/voice servers. Shared hosting on a windows box is stupid. So, you are going to want to familiarize yourself with *nix. Install a copy of one of the major server OSes on one of your computers and really become intimate with the command line. Remember, you are going to be controlling your *nix server via SSH which is 100% command line. So you may as well just drop the window manager.

Not sure what common Server OSes are? Well, not that I reccomend these, but the rising trend seems to be anything redhat based. From Redhat Enterprise to Fedora. And every fork in between, including CentOS. And if you aren’t really feeling Redhat, some people still use Debian, SuSe, and Slackware.

That is all I can muster tonight. I think this will be only a two-part series. Who knows. Expect me to go over Image and brand, Panels, Support, and Staff.