How to Build a Web Hosting Company
One of the more flexible businesses that can be run online is a web hosting business. You can run a small hosting business leveraging a reseller account. You can also rent dedicated servers, and build a hosting company that way. Starting out, it is probably best to use the services of a hosting company that offers reseller accounts. This will allow you to focus more time on building a business and less time on worrying about technical aspects of running a hosting company.
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Instructions
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Find a hosting reseller account. Starting out, it will be best to look for a hosting provider that offers shared reseller accounts. This is where a provider allocates a server to several people who resell hosting. They will carve out part of the server's resources for each reseller on the server. The downside is that you are sharing resources with outer resellers. However, the upside is that the costs are relatively low. This gives you an opportunity to see if this is something for you without investing a great deal on server infrastructure.
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Obtain a domain name. You will need to come up with a domain name that fits your hosting business, and register it at a domain name registrar. This can be done at any name registrar like Godaddy, Namecheap, Network Solutions, among others.
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Build a website. You will need to design a website that advertises your web hosting company, and the packages you will be offering. If you are not a designer, you can outsource this to a designer through various freelancer websites found online.
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Install a web hosting billing application. This will walk customers through the entire purchase process when ordering hosting from you. Furthermore, it will allow you to keep track of monthly and annual payments, support requests and other customer support functions. Some popular billing control panels are WHMCS, WHM Autopilot and Modern Bill.
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Advertise your hosting services. There are a variety of ways you can advertise your hosting services. You can rely on search engine searches, but this is a competitive niche to optimize a site for the search engines. There are many web hosting directories you can list your business with. Forums and classifieds are another good source of advertising for web hosting services.
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Set up a support system. You can handle support yourself to get started. This will entail answering support tickets that can involve technical issues, billing issues or sales questions. However, you can also outsource support of your hosting company. There are many companies online that dedicate their whole business to outsourced support. You can pay by the ticket, by the hour or pay a flat fee each month.
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References
Resources
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