Hi, I have opened a web hosting site Aqns Hosting. I am offering free as well as paid hosting, I need some advice regarding my plans. I would be very grateful if you visit my website and see the packages and tell me what is the Fair Price for the current paid hosting plan and can any one please suggest a fair and balanced plan which I can offer on my site?

Thanks in advance.

What is your current budget? Linux or Windows? Make sure you pick a fast enough server to handle the load for your shared/free hosting customers.

Well irrespective of your prices, you aren't going to sell many web hosting plans at the moment as your own hosting plan appears to have been suspended!

My stupid hosting provider is now saying that their data center is not allowing free hosting! Because of which my account is suspended!!!

Hmm... was this in their small print when you signed up for the plan?
***Always Read the Small Print***

In business its essential to fully understand the terms upon which your suppliers will be prepared to do business with you. Especially when your business model revolves around reselling someone else's service.

But hey why were you offering FREE hosting anyway? 95% of free hosted sites are non-commercial, non visited, dull personal homages, which means that even if you are getting income from inserting ads onto their sites they would generate very little revenue. To work free hosting effectively on an ad-revenue basis you need thousands of hosted sites with good overall levels of visitors. A small reseller is unlikely to get this level of interest.

Which in turn makes me a little surprised that your host was so fearful of your success that they suspended your account. But I can understand them not wanting to have "free hosted" sites on their servers, it would undermine their service.

I hate to be pessimistic, but I've got to be honest, I'm not sure your brand is going to recover from this, because here we have a thread which already ranks no.3 in Google for "AQNS HOSTING" which kinda sets out the demise of your company before it even began.

Hmmm... Thanks for your replies. Just want to ask 1 question that how much does it take for a hosting business to break even?? If I only offer paid hosting then what estimates do you have that how much time will it take me to break even? And what is the best method or way to get customers?

Thanks in advance.

Mate there is no way anyone but you can answer that question. Your break-even point is where your income surpasses your costs, only you know your business costs and only you know how many hosting plans you need to sell at your current pricing levels to cover those costs.

If you have low prices then you need to attract more clients in order to break even, higher pricing requires fewer clients. Higher pricing doesn't necessarily make it harder to attract clients, but you certainly need a USP (Unique Selling Position).

Having fewer clients paying more, makes business administration and maintaining a personal relationship with your clients easier, but also makes your business vulnerable to losing a large chunk of income if you loose a few clients. Having a larger number of clients paying less gives you precisely the opposite set of problems.



This depends on your strategy for your business, if your aiming to attract a large amount of customers paying very little, then clearly you need to advertise to attract business, be that by gaining good placement in the natural search engine results or by bidding on sponsored search. Of course this tends to bump up your costs and you then need to attract even more customers to break even.

If you work the opposite model of charging more and requiring fewer clients then you can rely more on referrals and word of mouth as your service levels will invariably be higher. Not having a huge budget to launch my business, I opted for this route and one strategy I've found works particularly well is to set-up a network of IT professionals who refer me business.

There is probably a happy medium somewhere in between, but there is often more difficult to set yourself out from the crowd.

Thank you soooooo much for your detailed explainations! Thank YOU!!
By the way for much time are you in the hosting business and how much budget do you recommend I should have?

I've been involved in Web Hosting and Web Development for 7 years in total, almost 5 years with my first company (which I sold to my ex-partner), and now over 2 years with my present company Nuclear Internet.

As to what budget I recommend, well that really depends on how you plan to approach things. But I'll be honest, in my work as a web developer, I meet so many people starting on-line businesses with little to no idea of the costs involved or with the necessary budget to meet those costs.

Due to the inevitable failure of people who don't sufficient budget to launch an on-line business, I normally won't entertain a Web Development project budgeted at less than $1600 and I always recommend that clients have at least as much again to spend on Internet Marketing during the first year. Bear in mind that most of my clients have off-line (non-internet) arms to their business, those who are going to attract customers exclusively via their web site should budget much more.

So even a small business start-up with the most trivial of web presence should budget at least $3200 (that's £1600 or 2250 Euros). If you are trading exclusively on-line, then this should be higher.

I see no reason why starting a web hosting business should be cheaper than launching and other kind of business.

Of course having the budget is one thing, knowing exactly how to spend it is another.

Hi,

Mate not meaning to be harsh but running any business is serious work, your clients will be relying on you to provide them with a product and service that they require to operate their business! You may need to take a step back and plan before jumping in the deep end. Without understanding budgets, break even points and the fundamentals of running a business you ware only setting yourself up for hard times and possible business failure.

The questions you are asking you should have the answers for.