silentcorner

This is a typical example of what’s wrong with the webhosting industry (specifically the low cost webhosting industry):

Hi, just wondering for a webhosting company, after you have your dedicated servers, site and domain up, what other intial cost’s are there? I was talking to another guy who said there are legal issues, like “registering the buisness, getting tax id”. I was wondering if someone could elaborate on this and tell me what other intial costs there are to launch a hosting company?

and…

hello, im in *****, and i wnt to start a webhosting company, do i need to register anything? from the governemt? etc, and if people were to call in, how would i go about charging them? do i ask for their credit card, or what? im pretty new to this so any help would be apreicated, also, what about didication servers, can you host websites with dedicated servers? thanks

I’ve been doing webhosting for several years mostly just for myself, a few friends, and a couple of businesses, so I don’t really consider myself a professional webhost (not in the sense of budget webhosting, I do it regularly for large corporate sites as my job). But over the past few months (part of the reason I haven’t been blogging as much) I’ve moved everything I used to host out of my apartment to dedicated servers (currently utilizing 4 on a couple providers) including this site, and taken my hosting to the next level. I also do occasional system adminstration for a popular low cost webhosting company mostly related to security. So needless to say, I’ve become much more exposed to the budget hosting industry then I used to be.

Anyone who’s actively looked for a budget webhosting provider to host their site on has probably found out there are literally thousands of choices, but only a small fraction of them are actually reputable. I almost view webhosting as the wild west… anyone can come in and stake their claim, but only a few will make it big. You have webhosting company owners who are too young to drive, and owners who are probably grandfathers. But age isn’t even the issue… it’s that people see webhosting as relatively inexpensive to start and think it’s simple to run, hoping for quick cash, and therefore we have numerous webhosting companies that don’t know a thing about service, and will likely only be around long enough to sign people up, take their money, and then go out of business leaving hundreds of people stranded looking for another host. Customer service in particular is pretty non-existant in the majority of these providers. Woe to you who need support for your hosted site! Plus with no regulation, you find people claiming to be a hosting provider with multiple datacenters, huge infrastructure, and large bandwidth, when in reality they just have a reseller account on a shared server at a single provider.

To compound the problem, people looking for webhosting expect the world on a dime. Provide webhosting for $5 a month… the price most people would spend on a single lunch, or a couple cups of starbucks coffee …and people will complain you charge too much because someone else is charging $4 a month. It doesn’t matter that the $4 provider’s system is oversold, gets hacked regularly, and doesn’t respond to help desk tickets… it’s $1 a month cheaper!

Webhosting is a tough market, both for providers and the customers. Too many people enter the business who don’t know what they are doing, charge insanely low prices, and screw over customers with poor service on a regular basis, and customers will keep bouncing among these companies that keep popping up and disappearing as they try to chase the “best deal” encouraging more people to start webhosting companies. This makes it harder on legitimate hosting providers as they have to lower prices to remain competitive. Then on the customer side, customers have a harder time finding quality hosting providers because of the numerous options they have to sift through. It’s a vicious cycle I tell you. One that will probably exist for many years to come.

My advice, though, to anyone looking to host a website: Do your research, and be willing to spend a few extra bucks a month to get service that won’t leave you pulling your hair out on a regular basis. There are good hosts out there, ones that care about their customers, know how to run a business, and put the effort into it to provide quality service. They may be hard to find, but when you find them, they are worth it.