Seeking Guidance for Starting a Web Hosting Business from Scratch

Hello BHW community,

I'm excited to be back in the web hosting game! In the past, I ran a successful web hosting business as a reseller. However, this time around, I'm determined to dive deeper into the industry and build my hosting empire from the ground up. I've decided to use my own dedicated server, along with WHMCS and Plesk for the control panel. But, I need some guidance as I've never set up a dedicated server myself for this purpose, particularly when it comes to splitting it into multiple shared hosting environments for my customers. I hope you can lend me a hand; your expertise would be greatly appreciated.

I'm interested in learning about:

• Dividing the Server into Shared Hosting Environments: I plan to offer shared hosting to my customers. How can I effectively divide the resources to ensure each hosting account gets the necessary resources for smooth performance?

Your insights and advice will be invaluable in helping me build a reliable and customer-centric hosting service. I'm eager to learn from your experiences and expertise in the web hosting industry.

Thank you in advance for your support, and I look forward to hearing from you!

As you say that you have experience in the field, you probably hear this over and over again and you know that wenhosting is a saturated market, so I will not mention it

You mentioned that you will be using your own dedicated server - is this a rented server from another provider or you have bought a server? If you bought it, is it colocated in a data center or you will be running this from your home or office? This is critical for the service and SLA that you can provide to your potential customers. Connectivity can be key as well as the hardware specs - HDD vs SSD vs NVMe, CPU, RAID, memory etc.

Moving forward, WHMCS, although still so widely used is in decline, after it was bought by Webpros (who also own cPanel, Solus, Plesk and many many more). They changed the pricing from flat fee to per user, so in the long run it can be expensive. New players are slow to enter the market, just because there isn't that much upside potential - one hosting company only needs 1 such license so server control panels are way more profitable niche for devs. Still some new players around - Upmind is one and WiseCP - my personal favourite.

Choosing Plesk is an interesting choice as maybe I just have less experience with it, but most people are used to cPanel and tend to find their interface non-intuitive and confusing. In my opinion cPanel is still king and if you only offer Plesk, unless you have a good reason to go with it, might be a negative thing.

To divide and manage resources for clients (also for security reasons) I would recommend that you use Cloudlinux - it's paid, but so worth it. It works with both cPanel and Plesk, but will allow you to more granularly divide resources between users, so you don't have to deal with server overloads.

Another key point is support - it depends on what type of audience you are targeting, but you always need it. Some customers are used to chats nowadays, some, mainly US clients still prefer phones. Few dinosaurs still prefer the best method, unfortunately, tickets.

Honestly it's not a small venture to set up everything in a way that things don't become a bottleneck down the road once you become to grow.

Personally if I were to start today, I would go with Option A or Option B, depending on whether I have money.

Option A - little to no money to invest

1. Create my site with WordPress/HTML template, use WiseCP or WHMCS for billing/support and automation
2. Rent a Dedicated server from a reputable server provider.
3. Virtualise it - Proxmox - as it's free.
4. Create 1 large VPS for shared/reseller hosting and sell the rest of resources as client VPS servers.

Once you grow - it's the good problems - you can rent more servers or buy your own and colocate.

Option B - have money to invest

1. Hire someone to develop a really good site and use WiseCP or WHMCS for billing/support and automation.
2. Buy a very good second hand server from ebay or another provider and get 1 or 2 U COLO with a reputable provider.
3. Virtualise it with Virtualizor - cheap but great
4. Create 1 large VPS for shared/reseller hosting and sell the rest of resources as client VPS servers.

Rinse and repeat.

Still the most difficult job remains getting clients and retaining them

Good luck with your venture!

gpetkof said:

As you say that you have experience in the field, you probably hear this over and over again and you know that wenhosting is a saturated market, so I will not mention it

You mentioned that you will be using your own dedicated server - is this a rented server from another provider or you have bought a server? If you bought it, is it colocated in a data center or you will be running this from your home or office? This is critical for the service and SLA that you can provide to your potential customers. Connectivity can be key as well as the hardware specs - HDD vs SSD vs NVMe, CPU, RAID, memory etc.

Moving forward, WHMCS, although still so widely used is in decline, after it was bought by Webpros (who also own cPanel, Solus, Plesk and many many more). They changed the pricing from flat fee to per user, so in the long run it can be expensive. New players are slow to enter the market, just because there isn't that much upside potential - one hosting company only needs 1 such license so server control panels are way more profitable niche for devs. Still some new players around - Upmind is one and WiseCP - my personal favourite.

Choosing Plesk is an interesting choice as maybe I just have less experience with it, but most people are used to cPanel and tend to find their interface non-intuitive and confusing. In my opinion cPanel is still king and if you only offer Plesk, unless you have a good reason to go with it, might be a negative thing.

To divide and manage resources for clients (also for security reasons) I would recommend that you use Cloudlinux - it's paid, but so worth it. It works with both cPanel and Plesk, but will allow you to more granularly divide resources between users, so you don't have to deal with server overloads.

Another key point is support - it depends on what type of audience you are targeting, but you always need it. Some customers are used to chats nowadays, some, mainly US clients still prefer phones. Few dinosaurs still prefer the best method, unfortunately, tickets.

Honestly it's not a small venture to set up everything in a way that things don't become a bottleneck down the road once you become to grow.

Personally if I were to start today, I would go with Option A or Option B, depending on whether I have money.

Option A - little to no money to invest

1. Create my site with WordPress/HTML template, use WiseCP or WHMCS for billing/support and automation
2. Rent a Dedicated server from a reputable server provider.
3. Virtualise it - Proxmox - as it's free.
4. Create 1 large VPS for shared/reseller hosting and sell the rest of resources as client VPS servers.

Once you grow - it's the good problems - you can rent more servers or buy your own and colocate.

Option B - have money to invest

1. Hire someone to develop a really good site and use WiseCP or WHMCS for billing/support and automation.
2. Buy a very good second hand server from ebay or another provider and get 1 or 2 U COLO with a reputable provider.
3. Virtualise it with Virtualizor - cheap but great
4. Create 1 large VPS for shared/reseller hosting and sell the rest of resources as client VPS servers.

Rinse and repeat.

Still the most difficult job remains getting clients and retaining them

Good luck with your venture!

Click to expand...

First of all, thank you so much for the detailed guidance.

Yeah, I am planning to buy it from a third-party provider, specifically from Kimsufi, as running a home server is a headache. Choosing Plesk instead of cPanel is just a way to save some bucks; it might seem silly, but I am trying to spend as little as possible since this whole thing might not work out. I hope you understand my reasoning.

Are Proxmox, Cloudlinux, and Virtualizor all virtualization tools? I have never used these tools before; they are new to me as I have only used reseller hosting in the past.

It seems like quite a challenging task to handle everything on my own. Do you think it's better to go with a reseller instead of managing everything myself? I would appreciate your honest opinion, considering my limited budget.

Without any experience, you should not enter this business. You may try to JV with someone who has all the necessary information.

okagoogle said:

I'm interested in learning about:

• Dividing the Server into Shared Hosting Environments: I plan to offer shared hosting to my customers. How can I effectively divide the resources to ensure each hosting account gets the necessary resources for smooth performance?

Click to expand...

That depends on what kind of isolation you're looking for and what you're hosting.

If you want to provide a full-blown private server to your customers, You need some virtualization technology like Proxmox or ESxi or vSpehere.
The latter two are full hypervisors, Proxmox uses Linux containers, which is more lightweight. And a good option if you only plan to provide Linux hosting.

If you only want to host websites like wordpress/php/html-css sites etc. All you need is some automation that can setup virtualhosts for some webserver. This is what Control panels do.
They give an isolated environment to each account without full-blown virtualization. It's like a chroot.

If you have the money to spend on a WHM license, it will help to set something like this up. Otherwise you might need to come up with something on your own.

okagoogle said:

First of all, thank you so much for the detailed guidance.

Yeah, I am planning to buy it from a third-party provider, specifically from Kimsufi, as running a home server is a headache. Choosing Plesk instead of cPanel is just a way to save some bucks; it might seem silly, but I am trying to spend as little as possible since this whole thing might not work out. I hope you understand my reasoning.

Are Proxmox, Cloudlinux, and Virtualizor all virtualization tools? I have never used these tools before; they are new to me as I have only used reseller hosting in the past.

It seems like quite a challenging task to handle everything on my own. Do you think it's better to go with a reseller instead of managing everything myself? I would appreciate your honest opinion, considering my limited budget.

Click to expand...

Proxmox and Virtualizor are virtualisation tools, where Cloudlinux is an operating system like a paid version of CentOS/AlmaLinux that adds premium features - CageFS, LVE, Python and NodeJS selector, MySQL Governor, allows you to securely run legacy php versions etc.

From what I know Kimsufi is a budget division of OVH, so as long as you take offsite backups and have disaster recovery plan, you should be good.

Going with a reseller is always the cheapest option, of course, but it depends on what you aim to sell. For example I know that there is a WHMCS plugin that would allow you to resell Kimsufi's dedicated servers. Similar options and integrations are available for some large VPS providers, too.

Another major point is - do you have a target audience or a marketing plan, or clients that are ready to move in with you? The technical things can be challenging, but still the most difficult always is finding clients. That should be your starting point.

Ashk881 said:

If you only want to host websites like wordpress/php/html-css sites etc. All you need is some automation that can setup virtualhosts for some webserver. This is what Control panels do.

Click to expand...

Yes, that's what I want to provide to my customers. Do I need any virtualization for this? And can I achieve it with Plesk without using any virtualization tools?

gpetkof said:

Another major point is - do you have a target audience or a marketing plan, or clients that are ready to move in with you? The technical things can be challenging, but still the most difficult always is finding clients. That should be your starting point.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I do have a strategic plan. I am specifically targeting a 3rd-tier audience, which I already have. They are always seeking more affordable solutions.

okagoogle said:

Yes, that's what I want to provide to my customers. Do I need any virtualization for this? And can I achieve it with Plesk without using any virtualization tools?

Click to expand...

You can run this Github PHP script which automatically installs WordPress:
https://gist.github.com/mohandere/930a61f004d03acfc455

Instead of using plesk then you can use a free control panel like CentOS Web Panel, CyberPanel, Cloud Panel etc. but for your use case I think a reseller account would be best - you will save a lot on licenses and you can grow your business until ready to move to your own server.

If you choose to go for your own server, to offer a good reliable shared hosting services, I would say that cloudlinux is a must, as cloudlinux can keep each account within its own limits, and can separate it from the rest of the server, its optimal for shared hosting performance and also security wise it is good.

zakservers said:

If you choose to go for your own server, to offer a good reliable shared hosting services, I would say that cloudlinux is a must, as cloudlinux can keep each account within its own limits, and can separate it from the rest of the server, its optimal for shared hosting performance and also security wise it is good.

Click to expand...

Yes, it isolates accounts in chroot environment where if one site gets compromised, the attacker can't gain access to files in other accounts or system files on the server. It's critical for security.

with so many companies out there its hard to make $$$ selling webhosting nowadays good luck with your new biz!

Sandman_ said:

with so many companies out there its hard to make $$$ selling webhosting nowadays good luck with your new biz!

Click to expand...

It's still possible, but you need to have an edge and also find your niche. There are a lot of movements with big providers and clients do switch a lot, so you just need to be looking out for the opportunities.

About spliting, hosting providers often achieve it with Cloudlinux, there is a WHMCS plugin ) https://www.google.com/search?q=cloudlinux+whmcs