Hosting/Server Business

[dtmpower]

I am looking to setup a server for myself and to hire out to other individuals, so that it could grow into a self sustaining (financially) business.

How do hosting companies normally use the server resources amongst their customers ? Do customers log in to the server and have a area of hard disk space / their own NIC etc ..... or does the hosting company control the server and the customer makes request etc..... could anyone educate me on this ? What do hosting companies allow you to install on the server ? DO you get admin rights etc ?

Thanks

John

[sheets tabuer]

you can have anything from disk space to a server under your own control with remote desktop etc.

I have done this for a few years hosting games server for people to rent out, charged about £80 a month per server

It was a total pain in the arse hence why I don't do it anymore

[Phil Hopkins]

dtmpower said:

I am looking to setup a server for myself and to hire out to other individuals, so that it could grow into a self sustaining (financially) business.

How do hosting companies normally use the server resources amongst their customers ? Do customers log in to the server and have a area of hard disk space / their own NIC etc ..... or does the hosting company control the server and the customer makes request etc..... could anyone educate me on this ? What do hosting companies allow you to install on the server ? DO you get admin rights etc ?

Thanks

John

John, Jamie B is the man for this kind of stuff, but i've got 'limited' knowledge in this area.

I would suggest that your best bet is to actually buy a server and co-locate it in a server farm. This will give you the greatest flexibility & also allow you to retain everything under your control. A slightly cheaper option is probably to rent a server off someone like Jamie B and he'll allow you full admin rights to do whatever you want with it. Chances are you'll have an agreed monthly bandwidth usage figure that you'll have to share between your users.

The server control panels are incredibly simple to use, as a super user or admin you've got full control over everything from setting up additional domains/e-mail addresses/HD space/Bandwidth usage etc. You'll get access direct into that as opposed to making a request to the host.

How feasible it is as a small scale business I don't know. I'd suspect not unless you've got a load of customers already lined up.

[dtmpower]

I hope I am not treading on Jamie's toes ... but presuambly all hosting companies started somewhere... I have seen a rack rent of £200 a month and if i put my own server in I would guess thats going to cost £500 (and last many years)

Where is the money made in these business' cause I guess that register1 just piggy back in a datacentre?

[Phil Hopkins]

dtmpower said:

I hope I am not treading on Jamie's toes ... but presuambly all hosting companies started somewhere... I have seen a rack rent of £200 a month and if i put my own server in I would guess thats going to cost £500 (and last many years)

Where is the money made in these business' cause I guess that register1 just piggy back in a datacentre?

Yep but I suppose it's all about economies of scale. Register1 have thousands of customers and therefore hundreds of servers so they'll be able to negotiate preferential rates for rack space/bandwidth/hardware etc. That and there are hundreds of more established companies doing it. I just can't really see how you'd compete?

[Plotloss]

Resell

The investment required in creating a datacentre is mahoosive, much simpler to block buy server space off a provider and resell individual hosting accounts.

Muncher and Rico (I think) do this.

[JamieBeeston]

dtmpower said:

I hope I am not treading on Jamie's toes ... but presuambly all hosting companies started somewhere... I have seen a rack rent of £200 a month and if i put my own server in I would guess thats going to cost £500 (and last many years)

Where is the money made in these business' cause I guess that register1 just piggy back in a datacentre?

I think you missed a 0 off your Rack rent price...

In London, there is only really one main player these days, that's TeleCityRedbus, they were the two biggest rivals, who merged, and then bought out another big player, Globix.. so all that's left now within Docklands are Telehouse (full) IPHouse (non-premium) and LHC (Still decent!)

You can obviously host up north / out of London, but even those prices are on the rise (they know TCRB is ~£2k a month for a cab and 16amps so they have increased their charges accordingly)

Power costs ~ £100 per amp in TCRB, and with a max of 16 amps per cabinet, and a Dell 1425 taking maybe 0.8a a server, that's maybe 16 servers (plus a switch / firewall) per cabinet before you're full.

£2000 / 16 = £125 cost per server, before the COST of the server, before the COST of the bandwidth, before the COST of the support, before omg Profit ...

You can probably halve your costs by going to an out-of-London / up north datacentre, but that still leaves you at £62.50 just to turn a server (you've not yet paid for) on.

It's a very tight business at the bottom end of the market, that's why sooooo many of them are simply dropping like flies..
Unless you have a great USP, or independent (daddy) funding, or huge economies of scale then box shifting is going to be the least profitable sector of the market.
Much more profitable (in % terms) is reselling space on an existing dedicated server you have (either your own, or rented from someone else)
The benefit of renting is simple, no upfront costs for the hardware, no maintenance costs for the hardware, and if you want to upgrade, you just change to a more expensive plan and repeat without any lump sup costs. IF the server dies, it's their responsibility to fix it, so no 4am mad rush to a datacentre in the outer hebrides to see why your server wont turn on!

There are many control panels you can install on servers to allow you to divide it up into smaller chunks for users, giving them their own space, users, databases and so on.

If you get bored, check out the links in my profile, maybe one of them could help

J

[davidd]

Jamie is right about rack prices..ouch

We have just been through this as we needed to offload our hosting as doing it onsite was becoming a pain in the neck.

The issue we found was that to host in london we ended up with really harsh power restrictions which meant that we could rent a rack but could only ever 1/2 fill it before we ran out of power...

In the end we found a provider just outside the M25 who gave is 16A which is enough, we have a good deal on the connectivity and all is great..

To do the isp in a box thing have a look at the www.heartinternet.com reseller package, we use some of it for low value stuff, very easy to set up and seems to work pretty well.

D

[JamieBeeston]

We can offer 16/24/32a if you want, it just all comes at a price.

The better option is just to Rent the servers, that way you get the piece of mind that we're looking after the hardware, and you dont need to worry about power allowances.

J