Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
What will be the biggest challenge in running a web hosting business?
Thanks!
Bryan
Challenges will be different for everyone and much of it really depends on your business plan. What is the biggest challenge you feel you might anticipate?
Technical/hardware issues can be hideous! And that can cost you customers. Do you know how up to date the equipment is? (Assuming of course that you're referring to a pre-existing business.)
Server hardware and software is very predictable - it's a computer. You can setup backups, RAIDs, monitoring, etc... And never have any technical problems. It will be all automatic, or semi-automatic.
Customers are humans. You need a personalized approach. You cannot automate it in no way. People are not stupid, they can recognize canned responses. They can feel the bad vibe. They will know when you try to trick them.
Customers will also ask you questions you never thought of. They will have crazy requests, and you will need to respond quick. Preferably 24/7/356.
There is never enough time for anything.
If they're a reseller, find out who the provider is and check them out as well, as far as their terms, support, infrastructure, reputation, etc.
If they have their own datacenter, or colocate, that's another can of worms - then you need to know about equipment age/condition, redundancy, backups (data and power), routers, connections, and many other things.
Also look at what software they're using to run the backed systems - for billing, setting up accounts, and their procedures for handling these.
Do the math. How many clients, how much revenue, what are the costs, and do you have the staff to handle it?
Moltar is right about the customers - be prepared to have them call you and expect answers to the most basic of questions. Many assume that since you host their site, that you of course support everything that is related to the Internet or computers, whether it's their dsl, cable, dial-up, network, anti-virus, spyware, etc. etc. etc. Sometimes they'll do things without understanding the ramifications, and you get to fix it. Just go in understanding that component and it's ability to suck time and life out of you. ;)
LisaB
Server hardware and software is very predictable - it's a computer.
Just like when buying a car, make sure your don't get a lemon. My husband makes his living bailing folks out of situations resulting from bad/uninformed/poorly-planned purchases.
Not only are your ports being scanned 24/7 by hackers looking for a way to sneak in and wreak havok, there's the technology to keep up with. Our biggest issue right now is spam - dedicating server CPU, disk space, and bandwidth to blocking it, and always looking for better ways and algorythms to filter it out without losing anything valuable. It's a huge task. Then there's the whole support issue.
But the single largest reason I would never undertake such a business is the presence of large-dollar competition. The larger companies are selling mass bandwidth for $9.95 a month, and hosting sites for that or less - believe me it's REALLY hard to cut a profit competing with that. I say POWER TO YA and wish you the best of luck should you undertake this venture.
