dedicated or reseller hosting?

[gannik]

When you made up your mind to start a web hosting business what did you start from: dedicated or reseller hosting?

[ToddW]

Try posting in the webmaster / business area... maybe get better response ?

[gastongr]

None of them, i started with free hosting :p
Less responsibilities. You can make some money with ads in your site, not users one.
Maybe put a forum for support and build a community around that. After it has some decent ammount of users you can include paid plans if thats your main objetive. Or even start a brand new site and use the old free hosting one which gave you experience to promote your paid hosting site.

I didn't do any of those things as i haven't got the time requiered to run a good paid service. Instead i sold my free hosting site when i was bored of it.

[gannik]

I think for you, gastongr, it was just an entertainment.

[gastongr]

Yes, but want i meant is that starting with free hosting as entertainment or not will help you and make things easier for you when you move to paid.

Of course if you want to go directly to paid hosting it's perfectly right, the other step is just to gain experience, and my point was that the free hosting site will still be useful for you when you lunch a paid one.

Best of luck with your hosting project

[fermiop]

Yeah, I think starting from a free hosting is a good way of getting experience and it helps you to run your business in future using a paid hosting.

[CapsLOCK]

Hello
I think that dedicated server is better, But reseller package will be mo interesting for you I think.

[EAAowner]

Our company has helped quite a few individuals start their own small hosting business by supplying them with a reseller plan and then giving them the option to upgrade to a VPS and then dedicated server without much hassle. Reseller plans are usually cheaper, but you might not be able to receive the same access to certain features (we use cPanel/WHM, but resellers do not have root access), and support is a little different too. Unless you already have a set group of potential clients, going with a dedicated server is probably a mistake. Generating enough income to cover the cost of the dedicated is usually impossible for the first couple months if you don't already have a network of potential clients.

Feel free to message me with any questions!

-Matt

[Kron]

You'd be better to start your business from a reseller account with a partner. As far as I know there are nice offers from webhostingbuzz.com ($10 per month).

[nks]

Originally Posted by gastongr

None of them, i started with free hosting :p
Less responsibilities. You can make some money with ads in your site, not users one.
Maybe put a forum for support and build a community around that. After it has some decent ammount of users you can include paid plans if thats your main objetive. Or even start a brand new site and use the old free hosting one which gave you experience to promote your paid hosting site.

I didn't do any of those things as i haven't got the time requiered to run a good paid service. Instead i sold my free hosting site when i was bored of it.

Exactly... that's what I did too.
I started with Free Hosting to test the response of the site. Once I find that I get sufficient response and that the server is getting overloaded, then it is time to move to a paid shared hosting.

Paid Shared hosting may simply be sharing with other sites, but generally the services should be better than free hosting, since you are paying for the quality of services. However, if the the sites get larger and with heavier traffic coming in every day, then a dedicated server is a must to handle these load.

[charlesgan]

Originally Posted by gannik

When you made up your mind to start a web hosting business what did you start from: dedicated or reseller hosting?

you can consider each of them. but for budget wise, reseller account would be great. would cost $25-$30. And if you like to learn about running the server, then consider vps($35) before running a dedicated which would cost $100+

[fishfreek]

I went dedicated but I am not really a webhost in that I dont activly advertise. I got a dedicated box because I had something like 12 domains myself with content and it was cheaper for me to pay 1 monthly dedicated box fee than several webhosting accounts.

Since I had alot of excess capacity on the ded box I started offering hosting to friends and others I meet for very nominal monthly costs to help offset the server costs. Of course if I wanted to I could grow the business but the side effect is the server costs me out of pocket nothing now because the ads on my sites and the decent number of paid accounts I do have end up paying the monthly server fees.

[gannik]

I guess a reseller hosting will be O'k for me for beginning and then will see what to do.

[John Scott]

Reseller is crap. Not enough control over what you're selling.

Go dedicated.

[gate2vn]

Reseller is still good for new one. Dedicated server gives you more power, but it is not for someone who doesnt have experience on server management. Of course, if you can pay more for management service, it's fine

[Dotster]

I think that you should find cmpany which provides reseller packages and dedicated as well, like Ahosting.biz or Hostgator.com and start with reseller package. It will give you oppotunity to move on dedi any time without additional searching.

[Affnice]

I think reseller good start, when you get a lot experience than dedicated

[eukhost]

If you don't have much experience with server management and other technical aspects related to dedicated servers, you can get yourself a managed dedicated server or else starting with a reseller account would be good to start too.

[HV | Tracy]

We started with Dedicateds back in 2001.

Having a popular domain on a shared host is what got us into hosting in the first place.

It depends on your experience though... I have a strong background in Unix and networking.

What is good about using cPanel as your control panel, you can always use reseller hosting, get comfortable with that aspect, then get a dedicated server and use the account transfer function to transfer your accounts to your shiny new dedicated server.

[DennisBerc]

Start with reseller package and than you always will be able to movwу on dedicated.