How to Start Web Hosting/Managed Hosting Business in 2020

We’ll cover many different parts of web hosting or managed server hosting business in this article.
 

Quick History:

Web Hosting business is not new, it’s been one of the first businesses launched since internet and websites became mainstream.
Many web hosting companies power 1000s of websites to this day. You may know some of the big ones such as Godaddy.
 
But there are still many smaller web hosting providers, and they are able to keep customers and even charge more by providing.
This generally meant that smaller hosting providers had technical background and were Linux system admins in most cases.
 

Equipment and Tools:

 
Dedicated Servers
Generally, most providers, including the big hosting providers had to buy/lease dedicated servers to be able to run their web hosting business.
 
Management Software
In addition, you also needed web hosting management software, such as cPanel or Plesk to be able to make it easier to create/manage websites using a web interface instead of manual configuration.
 
Maintenance
Hosting providers also needed lots of other software, tools, scripts to maintain these servers, backup data and more. Hence the need for technical background.
 
 

Web Hosting Industry Changes:

 
Demand:
There is still huge demand for web hosting as there are now billions of websites online and the number keeps increasing. However, web hosting industry on a decline.
 
What’s Changed:
While, the demand is still huge, web hosting industry is struggling because of several factors.
 

  1. Cloud Providers – dedicated servers used to cost $200/m and up. But with cloud tech, servers have become much cheaper, you can get a virtual server for as low as $5/m with DigitalOcean. Secondly, a lot of the time taking tasks such as backups, restores, scaling servers, some configuration and management is now built-into the cloud provider’s web interface. Hence, you no longer need be a linux expert to backup/restore servers or fix hardware issues or be concerned with scaling and signing large contracts to lease more servers. Cloud providers made entire process much easier and accessible to anyone without any long term contracts.
  2. Multi-Server issues –Cloud providers also gave a better way to scale and have higher uptime. Because you can now spread the hosting accounts across several servers, vs one big servers. And if something happens with one server, the rest of the accounts are not affected. But this had its own challenges as most of the hosting software was designed to be installed on each server. This meant that you had to install cPanel or another panel on every server and maintain them.
  3. Website/Technology changes – A lot of the hosting tools and software were designed a long time ago. They support some of the older website programming languages such as php, but many of them do not support the increased number of newer technologies. This causes customers to seek for alternative hosting options.
  4. App Hosting – unlike content based websites, applications have more in depth needs for different integrations and tools needed on the servers. Hence, many companies skip the hosting companies and go directly to Cloud Providers and get the servers. But then they need SysAdmin or DevOps experts to configure and maintain them.

 

Managed Hosting Providers

While Cloud providers made it really easy and affordable to obtain servers, scale up/down as needed. It did not really take away a lot of the server management and configuration. And because the legacy control panels don’t support a lot of the modern website technologies, a lot of this is being done via manual configuration and scripts. Server updates and monitoring is another area that requires some technical skills.
 

ZoomAdmin

ZoomAdmin was designed from ground-up to overcome some of the challenges and make it easier again to provide hosting services without making everything manual again.
 

Top Features:

 
Cloud Based – you no longer need to install/maintain a large hosting software on each server.
 
Multi-Server – you can see all of your servers in one place and go to one panel to manage all the servers.
 
Monitoring – It has built-in monitoring and system-logs.
 
Supports WordPress – already supports many of the legacy technologies and you are able to quickly create/mange websites.
 
Other Technologies – (coming soon) with our next release, we will offer docker support, which will allow you to be able to host most applications, including modern technologies with minimal effort.
 
 

How You Make Money

By now, hopefully you have a good understanding on web hosting and managed hosting business. And it’s ok if you need to do more research to understand some of the details.
 
But the key is that many businesses simply want to host their applications and websites affordably and quicker. By using ZoomAdmin, it should take you less effort to manage the apps, websites and servers and grow your business by providing better customer support and more affordable rates.
 
 

Where to Find Customers:

If you don’t have a large budget, it’s best when you first try to give value by answering questions on forums and eventually, people will ping you for services.
 
Here are some places where you can find clients who want to move/configure websites and servers. However,
– Digitalocean.com/community/questions
– Webhostingtalk.com
– Upwork
– Craigslist
– Freelancer.com
– Quora.com