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Would anyone be interested in a LEB provider?
I am thinking of starting up a LEB hosting company to get myself some experience and possibly make a tiny amount of money whilst at it.
I have a friend who is willing to pay for all the costs of running the business up until it can pay for itself, if ever.
I am just wondering if anyone would actually be interested in ordering a server and thus whether or not there is much point in me making the company at all. Seeing as I'm not exactly experienced with VPS hosting (I have hosted / sold gameservers before but that is much easier I presume as you only really need 1 IP address and TCAdmin is really easy to setup and use with WHMCS) and don't care all that much about profit the prices would be pretty cheap, I'll calculate the costs so that I can make a small profit with enough sales however for the most part I'm just doing this for long-term experience.
tl;dr thinking of setting up small leb hosting company, have little experience with VPS hosting, want to get to know the ropes of hosting VPS's, I have funding for this, is this a good or bad idea?
Comments
Some good advices you will find in this thread. http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/7544/need-help-for-starting-hosting-business/p1
Whatever you will do have in your mind that if you start vps hosting company clients will trust you with their own data and expect from you big responsibility. They won't look at service you provide as your learning experience but expect to get things they pay.
Main problem I see with some newer LEB hosts is that they start big advertisement campaign before they are ready. Don't do this or hosting community will tear you apart and then it will be everything even harder. Start with small steps.
You can do it all @ home.
Also LEB is pretty saturated
if you give me a good reason to choose you over any other provider, yeah
What prices have you got in mind??? If you're cheap enough I'm sure some people will give it a shot. But you got stiff competition. We can get a 256MB OpenVZ for $12 commonly, (even $10.99 SpotVPS) and 256MB KVM for $15. If you're going to do it, there is less competition in the sub 256MB market ...try there. But DON'T do a runner. Like Spirit said 'people will be trusting you', and if you're doing it as an experiment, then be honest and let people know that.
Ahh yes, I understand that entirely. The business, should it be set up, will be professionally done and not advertised until everything is set up and ready to go. Thanks for the advice.
Well the prices will be one thing. I'll also offer a week free trial of any server for the sake of testing the services out before buying. The prices will more than likely start at about £1 a month for 64mb RAM so they'll be very cheap.
You got no chance .....like I said $12 = £8 gets you 256MB with the like of ChicagoVPS/Semo/URpad, VPS providers that are not going anywhere, no one man shows! Even in the UK HTTPZoom gives you 96MB for £8/6.66 with promo code, see DOTVPS offers also a similar price in UK. Both VPS providers have a track record too. Then you got Lowendspirit 128MB for £~3/year
If prices are going to be your only pivot, don't bother. This community demands gigabytes of RAM and single-user disk i/o numbers for pennies per month, and will lynch and burn you alive when you don't provide.
Do something new and exciting.
Not to be a douche, but the guys above are right. Entering a saturated market you have little experience in, with only a vague idea and your mates money... it's going to be an uphill battle. Find something better to do with your summer
Probably best to work for an existing host first to get some experience etc.
If you want to get some experience with running VPS, why not get one of the larger KVM offers around here and run OpenVZ or Xen on that? I've got a 2GB KVM running Xen machines. I also had a box running OpenVZ so I could toy with veth networking. There's really no need to start a company to get experience. Although it may help, of course, it's not a requirement.
Besides, there's probably plenty of hosts here who have just followed the SolusVM installation guide and don't know much about running OpenVZ (for example, as it's the easiest to install and manage with SolusVM). My point is: running a business is no guarantee for knowledge and/or experience.
Came here just to see the "bad idea" posts.
Why not draw on your current experience and sell/support gaming VPS. People always want more control over their game servers and you can provide that extra niche support they may need that others providers here do not provide.
@ShardHost
Because of some reason normal gameservers aren't selling that good. Most of our customers are shared hosting or Minecraft (<- probably 60 or 70%) and only a few % are other games like CoD, CS etc.
Uh, actually I've been thinking of doing this since about a year ago, I just didn't have funding until now. And saying "your mates money" is pretty condescending considering that you literally have no idea who he is or my relation to him. He isn't my "mate".
That's where you draw the line between giving honest advice and being a douche.
Anyway that's the only thing I felt worth commenting on in any sort of depth.
I realise now that I probably should've started the business without first posting on here as it's mostly just people saying not to do it, which I get, but everyone's got to start somewhere and setting this up even if I don't sell anything or advertise it at all will still be experience earned. As well as that I'm not looking to get 100s of clients; even 10 would suffice.
The idea of this thread was to more try and get advice on how to go about doing this from already experienced hosts e.g what to do and what not to do, however I was pretty tired when I wrote the OP and I don't think that that came across all that much.
Regardless, I appreciate the advice.
@pebsie - you said he was a 'friend' = mate who was stumping up all the cash
you asked for advice about whether it was worth setting up a company - you got replies and advice. It looks like you didn't like/want the advice or expected it to be different.
PS: Let us know when you launch....
You can't just join the LEB market, I wouldn't touch it with a stick. I can't really see myself living in a house if I'd have to get all my money from a LEB Startup company.
@pebsie: Cause your avatar is cute, u should do it. Its just a matter times to your sites get popular and u need some experiences to support customers, a lot of them will be a troublesome but if u can handle this, u can open hosting company. I may become your customer if u want so when u decide to do, pm me to let me know ok?
Word of wisdom,
" Do not, I repeat, Do not set your business solely based on LEB standard".
The only problem with the sub 256MB market... it's not very viable. I've recently been doing some experimentation. With Xen, I can't get a vanilla minimal installer of CentOS 6 to start with under 512 MB, to boot to login with under 167 MB (I know, oddly specific). I can't imagine any of the other currently supported major distro's would be willing to dip that low.
Do you have any prior Linux/Unix experience? This is not something you just roll into. I have been working as a Linux engineer for over 10 years now and there is a big learning curve if you're just starting out.
E.g. Your customers will sometimes need you to fix issues with their VPS.
Be it networking, startup issues, anything really. You need to have knowledge of Linux and be able to debug if it gets really nasty. In fact, not just Linux knowledge but also knowledge of the virtualization type(s) you will use.
You can of course hire a Linux guy to do this all for you. But honestly with these kind of prices you will probably not even break even.
If you don't have this basic knowledge, I would not want to have a VPS with you. But that's just me personally, others may feel different about this.
Hope that gives you a bit of clarity.