running a hosting company need a lot of effort. you need to take care of support, you need to take care marketing, financing many many extra.

well, anyone who success running a hosting company here? how long do you break even? any thoughts ?

Hi i am a owner of a hosting and computer repair business, it tooked us a few months to break even as we offer our business customers web hosting which did keep us going when we started as a company in 2005 as a reseller now we have a few dedicated servers.

one for shared hosting packages and the offer is for our reseller customers.

Well, it depends on so many things. You need to know what is achievable and try to go in this direction. Sometimes it takes longer. The most important is to know you niche and place on the market. If you know what kind of customers you want to attract you will start making money.
If you have money for marketing , it will be even better, of course choosing the right marketing model its not that simple...and sometimes not easy.

Good Luck!
A.

yes it takes effort but can get really fun!

Yes efforts are need in any Business. If it was easy every one will jump in and spoil the market.

These days their are many companies that ask you to just sell services they will take care of support payments etc etc and you keep getting your share.

Your post made me smile, because I've noticed this forum is full of people looking for advice on starting their own hosting business often without the first idea of what running a business entails, they just figure that because they can use a control panel, they can purchase a reseller plan and set-up their own hosting business. OK - some do it very successfully and go-on to bigger and better things, but I bet well over 90% fail.

My business is now profitable, it took 18 months to reach that stage, and the hosting part of my business will be profitable from next year. I could have been profitable from the outset, but I didn't want to go down the reseller route and leave my business reputation in the hands of a large corporate. Instead I invested in my own servers and software and gave myself much more control over the service I provided.

This meant the other arms of my business subsidised my hosting services for the first 2 years, but I think it was worth it in the long run.

To be honest I'd like to hear more FColor, he looks like he has a solid business, I'd like to hear more about his marketing strategies. For my part my strategy has mostly developed around providing hosting services to clients whose web sites I've developed picking up the occasional hosting only account along the way. This was what made investment in my hosting infrastructure so vital, screw up the hosting and you lose the lucrative web dev contract. However, its also responsible for the slow start.