Every web designer or developer usually considers offering web hosting services as a complimentary service that fits well with their design services. My company offered web hosting services for the past 5 years… but we limited it to only customers that we did design work for.
The recurring revenue from web hosting helped my company get started… but it also got to a point to where the amount of hosting revenue that I had coming in each year was less than the amount of money it took to keep the web servers running each year. A lot of that had to do with the fact that I owned so many domain names of my own that I needed multiple servers to support my own company’s websites as well as to support the hosting division of my company. When I first started out… everything ran fine with my own websites sharing the same server as my customer websites.
Another thing to consider is the support that you must offer to customers that are hosting with you. For instance:
• Email issues including SPAM or missed emails
• Website downtime if anything goes wrong with your server
• General computer support as many customers will ask you for help with whatever computer issue they may be having at the time
• Hacker issues
There are things that come up when you are web host that you would never dream of happening. The ultimate nightmare… which I have experienced a few times is waking up one morning… knowing that you have a lot of projects on the table and finding your hosting server dead in the water. The phone will be ringing off the hook and you realize that your day will consist of ordering a new server and moving a hundred websites as quick as you can.
One other thing to consider about offering web hosting is that it is nearly impossible in today’s time to compete on price with the larger hosts out there. The only way to compete is offering better services than a lot of the bigger hosts… and even that is hard to do when a lot of the bigger companies have large support staffs.
I knew that one of the main changes I needed to make to my company was moving away from web hosting. How would I do this? This was the problem I ran into. When you have customers mostly paying by the year… and at different random months of the year depending on the customer billing cycle… there is no easy way to move away from web hosting.
When you have an internet store or even a brick & mortar business and want to shut it down… basically you close the doors or cancel the domain and take the loss yourself as an owner. When you are running a web hosting company… all of your customers are relying on you so you can’t just shut it off. Whatever move I was going to make… the most important thing would be that the customers would see very little downtime… and their future services would be up to the standards that I had provided with my company.
After exploring some options… my friend and server admin decided to take over my hosting customers under his new company of MatrixEast.com. This worked well since this was someone who I trusted to give the same level of support that I gave to my customers.
Its only fitting though that once we agreed on this and decided to make this change in early January… my main hosting server decided to crash the week before Christmas!!! While everyone was out doing their last minute shopping… my friend & I were moving websites and trying to fix any issues we found.
It was almost like my server was saying to me “You are not getting out of this so easily”.
