You might be better suited to swimming with sharks!
Running a web hosting company is not as easy as it seems, in
fact if I had to choose again maybe I would choose swimming with
sharks rather than being a web host.
The learning curve for me was huge, so I thought I would share
with you what I learned. Firstly you'll need to find a good
webhosting company. I'm not going to pretend to recommend anyone
in this article; you just need to search hard to find someone
that has the right technology, the right bandwidth and the right
support.
I ended up choosing a dedicated windows 2003 server with 250 Gb
of bandwidth and 80 Gb of hard disk space. I can remote desktop
to this server at any time to make any modifications I need
which provides great flexability. But with this flexability
comes complexity.
Your customers will expect the following from you:
- POP3 email and webmail
- Web site hosting
- FTP access
- Efficient billing
- Excellent support
- Statistics
Providing all of this is not easy and for the important things
like statistics or email it's worth paying to get the right
tools. If these things break then your customers yell and scream
until their fixed.
For email I selected SmarterMail from SmarterTools. This is a
great tool that provides POP3 and IMAP support and webmail. It
integrates with virus software and SPAM software (with a little
work) however it's reliable and easy to use.
I choose to stick with SmarterTools for Statistics and Support
software also. These tools are not the cheapest available
however they offer a great user experience. I love the support
tool especially, and so do my clients. They can send an email to
support@yadayada.com and the support request automatically gets
routed to the right person who then gets an email. The customer
can manage the whole process just by replying to emails which
makes it really easy for them. I manage the whole process
through a simple web interface and can route requests to the
right people responsible for fixing the problem.
The stats software is farily standard, it does have some nice
graphics which customers like, and it's built to manage multiple
domain names and sites which is perfect for a web host.
Billing is something that took a while to get sorted. Initially
I just managed everything in an excel spreadsheet but that very
quickly become too hard to manage. I then developed an Access
database to help, which I quickly outgrew also. The main problem
I found was that both of these solutions needed a human (me) to
actually make them work. I needed something that was going to be
completely automated. Just on a side note, most of my customers
are small businesses looking for some hand-holding; as such they
are not the sort of customer to 'sign-up' on a website for
hosting. In fact that's not the product we really offer anyway.
Today I am running with an open source billing system called
phpCOIN. This software allows me to set up recurring invoices
that automatically get sent as they roll around. The new version
to be released this year will actually deliver a PDF email which
I'm sure my customers will like even more. This filled a huge
void.
The final part in making all of this work was learning all about
DNS. When I started this business I understood the concepts but
had never actually made it work. I know what a DNS server did,
but not really how. This is the one thing that can really screw
you around if you get it wrong, because your customers are the
first people on the phone when their website is down or the
email is broken.
I would recommend a great deal of research in this area to
ensure you are not in over your head. Once you learn about A
records and MX records however, it really quite simple. There
are many sites offering advice in this area, and I would head to
some forums to get your questions answered quickly.
So am I happy to doing this? To be honest I love it! Running
this system gives me the power to built websites on the fly, not
only for my customers but for myself and my family also. And I
know that the only person I need to rely on is me.