Earn a Passive Income by Starting Your Own Web Hosting Business
Are you a tech-geek expert on websites and great in setting them up? Well if that’s the case, starting your own web hosting business might just be the great idea for you. You can very well use your skill in setting up websites to generate a passive income not only month after month but maybe even in all the years to come.
The Web Hosting Market
The web hosting industry is an ever evolving market that is now whipping up some new opportunities. Entrepreneurs who are interested in starting their very own hosting businesses can now have some real chances of earning passive income. Of course, these opportunities won’t make you rich quickly. It takes time with lots of planning and hard work to make it all happen.
But if you are ready to jump at these opportunities waiting for you, you will find this article offering the basics of running your own hosting company. It will offer a guide that will help you navigate through the ins and outs of the business as well as avoid possible pitfalls. With all these, you can begin solidifying your career as a businessman and earn your success.
What is Web Hosting?
Before anything else, it is best to learn first of what is web hosting. Web Hosting is the business where you provide storage space as well as easy access to websites. With websites now an integral part of every business, the web hosting market is a quite a competitive field. However, it cannot be denied that it is also one that’s most profitable especially so if you’ve done it right.
As website hosting business, you rent storage space as well as certain amount of bandwidth for a set period of time. Your earnings come from the difference of the costs incurred on operating your servers, your customer service or reseller costs and then the amount that you charge your customers with. Based on these three, you can earn a considerable number of earnings.Whether to start a web hosting company or not depends on your motivation. Before head on starting your own web hosting business, your motivations should be clear and focused. Right from the start, you should have a clear understanding of the challenges you are likely to encounter. What you expect from a web hosting business should be clear so you can focus on all the other aspects of the business.
How to Start Your Own Web Hosting Business
There are different ways and options that you can start a web hosting business with. But all of these starts with a server. The server is kind of like a mega hard drive where you will have to store and file all the websites you will be supporting. You can expect that servers don’t come cheap with the most basic servers costing about $500 and the top-of-the-line more than $100, 000.
Then, you will also have to look for a dry, cool storage place where you can set up your server. There has to be lots of electricity to the storage place and you’ll have to think about network outages as well. You have to think about and prepare for inevitable downtime caused electrical outages which means you need to prepare a backup generator as well. These are things you need to consider when it comes to owning a web hosting business.
As for the storage place of your server, you can set them up at a colocation. This is an external site which offers you immediate access to your servers, day or night. Additionally, they offer you necessary supplies for the storage environment and the electricity for your servers. With colocation, it is like you a storage locker where you can conveniently store your servers.
Reseller Webhosting or Dedicated Server
If you want to start small, renting a server from large website hosting companies could be great for you. From there, you can begin working your way to earning your own server. Compared to buying your own server right off the bat, this is way cheaper and thus you don’t have to worry about storage anymore.
If you decide to simply rent for now, there are two renting options you can choose from: dedicated server or reseller webhosting. The difference between the two is that in a “reseller account”, your landlord hosting company is the one that takes care of your server. Their management team takes care of your server including the installation of control panel, software and backups.
In the case of dedicated server, you and/or your landlord web hosting will be in charge of operating of the server. Some web hosting companies, though, still gives you the option of having their management team handle your dedicated server. The advantage of reseller is that you can save yourself from management costs and avoid further challenges in managing your reseller server.
As for dedicated server, you can have better control of your server’s performance including its speed and security. This, however, is a bit more expensive compared to a reseller one. Whatever you choose, it all depends on your needs and what your client needs. You have to think well what you want to offer to your customers before choosing which renting option you want.
Getting Clients and Advertising Your Web Hosting Business
Once you have your servers set up, the next thing you need to do is get clients. You can start offering hosting space with some of the people you know such as your friends. Then you can work on a marketing strategy and advertising to let more people know of your business. Potential clients will not automatically flock to your business, you will need some advertising work explaining why your business is better compared to other web hosting business.
Think of the advantages and benefits you can offer to your clients. With large web hosting companies in the competition, you will have it hard. However, if you can highlight the benefits of getting you as web host say you have a killer processor, you can get their attention. This is why you need advertising and make the most of what SEO can offer you.
If your target clients are local business owners, then local advertising might just work for you. At the same time, internet advertising might work for you as well such as SEO and Google AdWords. If you can do it right, Google AdWords can bring you loads of clients which will bring you a good amount of passive income.