How to Start Your Web Hosting Company in 2024?

The question is: How to start your web hosting company? This article contains 11 steps with bonus tips for new hosting companies.

Starting a web hosting company from home is not easy but if you are a person who has a good plan, patience and support, no one can stop you from being successful. You can follow our guide to start your own Hosting firm.

I run Dewlance.com and I was as excited in 2009 about starting a new web hosting business as you are today. I was dreaming of building my own hosting company. Now, a year after my hosting business has achieved success, I have learned many things about how to improve my business during these 14 years in operation. However, I do not wish to waste your time and will get to the point quickly.

Step 1: Find out the type of service you will be providing:

First, research the type of service you will offer, as there are various options such as shared hosting, virtual private servers (Linux or Windows VPS), domains, reseller hosting and cloud hosting.

Once you have made these decisions, research your hosting brand name. It should be unique and meaningful to you.

Step 2: Choose a Brand Name for Your New Web Hosting Company

It is important, and here are some tips to help you in your choice:

• It shouldn’t violate other trademarks.
• It shouldn’t be in conflict with other company names.
• Avoid using your own name because you are providing a professional service.
• Avoid dictionary words.

You can use a search engine to find your hosting company brand name. It will make your task easier.

After you have decided on the name of your brand, the next task will be to register your brand as a domain name. There are some good domain registrars like Namecheap, Internetbs, or Bigrock.

Step 3: Host your domain.

After purchasing a domain, you will need a hosting provider to host your domain name.

Step 4: Find a reliable hosting company.

Nowadays, there are many companies providing hosting services, and it’s hard to judge any of them simply by reading reviews. The reason is that reviews can be faked, and your competitors may also post negative reviews about you.

How to find a good hosting company:

1. Consider the age of the hosting company; generally, older companies are more reliable.
2. Avoid new companies, as they may go out of business without notice, especially important if you are hosting your reseller business website.
3. Ensure the hosting company is registered and offers a 99.99% SLA uptime guarantee.
4. Monitor their website uptime for a few days to assess reliability.
5. Check if they provide a good control panel like cPanel or DirectAdmin for easy management.
6. Open a ticket with them, ask any question you might have, and check their response time. Did you receive a response within 3 to 9 hours? If yes, open a new ticket the next day on a different subject and match the response time. If they do not take a whole day to reply, then their support system is good. You can also buy a hosting plan.

Step 5: From Web Hosting Business Ideas to Design:

You can hire a web designer for your hosting website or purchase a ready-made WordPress or HTML theme from websites like Themeforest.net. There are also many free/paid themes available on other sites, and you just need to Google them.

Step 6: Creating Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, and VPS Plans

Hosting companies with well-researched plans tend to stay in business longer. Many new companies that registered in January closed their doors in March due to a lack of a good and up-to-date plan. Take a pen and paper, a calculator, or a digital notepad (whichever you feel more comfortable using) and create your hosting plan. Look at the hosting plans of others, but do not copy them. Make your plan by calculating your profits and expenditures and do not try to sell at a very low or a very high price. Once we tried to sell a plan under $3 a year but failed to get a single customer, so we increased the price. This sent a strong message to visitors that they can trust us and that we are not running our company at a loss.

If customers think you are selling products at a loss, they will be scared and refrain from purchasing from you.

Step 7: Billing Software for Automation of Accounts for Your Reseller Business

You need hosting billing software that allows customers to purchase from your website. The software will save customers’ profiles and account details in a database. It automates account management, including the creation of hosting accounts with a single click and invoice management.

A list of some popular billing software used by web hosting providers includes:

• WHMCS: This billing software has been in existence for many years and is widely used by most companies.
• Blesta: Another good billing software, which is 99.99% open source, secure, and developer-friendly. This is also a widely used panel.

If you can’t afford it, then consider a free billing software, but this is not recommended for a hosting company.

Step 8: Choosing a Payment Gateway

You need to use an online payment gateway to accept online payments from your customers. The most preferred gateway is PayPal, but many other payment processors are also available.

• PayPal: This is the most popular payment gateway used by hosting companies.
  

• Bitcoin: Between 2012 to 2013, most hosting companies avoided using Bitcoin because of it being illegal or they considering Bitcoin a bad currency. However, even big companies use it these days as it has already been legalized in many countries.

• Stripe: This payment gateway is not available in many countries but is widely used by US/UK companies.

• Offline/Bank: You can accept cash payments via online banking or provide instructions to a gateway on how they can pay you.

Step 9: Register Your Hosting Company

If everything is fine and your website is ready, you can register your company in your city/country.

It is a necessary step because many payment gateways will not accept your business until you show them proof of a company registration. It can also be illegal to run a business in your country without registration, so it is advisable to consult your legal advisor on the matter.

Step 10: How and Where to Advertise Your Hosting Company

Once everything is properly set up, the website, the payment gateway, the hosting server, etc., and people can place an order on your website, you will need to advertise your company via online and offline methods.

• Advertise Your Hosting Services on Forums: Open your favorite search engine like Google or Bing, search for “web hosting forums” and you will receive more than enough results. Join some of the forums and advertise your site.

• Blog: You can use guest posting or make your own blog and write useful articles that attract targeted visitors to your business.
• PPC: Pay Per Click is also a popular option to advertise your website with. You need a good budget for advertising and one of the most popular PPC is Google AdWords.
• Comment Posting: Find blogs related to your niche, ensure the blog is reputable and post useful comments. Do not post useless information and never use an automated poster. Else, you will regret it.

Final Step 11: How to Deal with Customers

The customer is a king. Respect them. Your attitude must be friendly. Try to connect with your customers via social sites. They will feel much better and maybe even consider using your services for a long time.

1.  Web Hosting Business needs Best Customer Service with quick response time:

If it takes you anywhere between 24 and 48 hours to respond to a ticket, you need an improvement because no one would want to wait for an entire day to just receive a response. If it takes you too much time to respond, then your customer will sign up with another company. Strive to provide a fast response time like within 10 to 15 minutes and check on how much time it takes you to resolve an issue.

Good customer service means either having a fast ticket response time or providing live chat support, and ensuring that it doesn’t take too long to resolve a ticket.

2.  Live Chat Support

I recommend that every new hosting company provides live chat support for sales. You can secure many new customers when your company is new and visitors feel secure that you provide live chat and their issues are solved quickly.

Other Tips for Starting a New Hosting Company:

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1. Your hosting plan must be up-to-date with the market rates.
2. It doesn’t have to be cheap because people will be worried when you sell a VPS with 20GB RAM under $1 a month. This will prevent you from securing serious customers and no one will use your services for a business purpose.
3. Be active in community forums. Make a forum contest and it will attract users. Some of them can become your customers.
4. Advertise your business regularly.
5. Never trust people working remotely. Avoid hiring remote staff and monitor your server.
6. Be active on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
7. Never give up. No one has built a hosting company overnight. You have to have patience.
8. Take a backup of your server and accounts to an offside server. You wouldn’t want to lose data.
9. Always use up-to-date software.
10. Save money for your business. Without financial backup, your business is at risk. Many successful businesses see ups and downs and close doors due to a lack of money in an unfortunate situation.
11. Keep away from illegal things. Don’t host copyright materials. Avoid hosting illegal files on 100%.
12. Monitor your business growth. This is very important for a new business. If you have statistics data on the type of customers you are after, you can target them more successfully.
13. Give coupons. This is a good practice for attracting more customers.
14. Check the websites of other companies, examine what they do and what their plans and pricings are. This will give you an idea of how to create competitive plans.
15. Listen to your customers. If they say something is bad, you must at least look at their complaints. If your customers say that your website is not working but it does work from your side, don’t ignore their complaints.

Dewlance hosting is eager to help anyone who wants to open a new hosting company or is in need of web hosting-related services. Feel free to open a ticket with us and we will provide the support you need.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. Is Web Hosting Business Profitable?

The answer is yes. However, profitability also depends on how you manage your web hosting business and acquire hosting customers.

2. Can we create our own web hosting?

Yes, you can create it by running a web server on your computer. However, web hosting is a professional business, and we recommend using a commercial dedicated server.

3. How much money can you make from web hosting?

Many large companies make billions from their web hosting, reseller hosting, VPS, dedicated server, and colocation businesses. The amount you can make depends on the quality of your company, response time, and server speed.

4. Is web hosting still a profitable business?

Yes, it is still profitable. However, we do not want to discourage you. Web hosting is a professional business, and you should treat it as such.