What to Look For When You Start Your Own Web Hosting Company

Operating System

There are generally two choices when it comes to selecting an OS for your server; you can choose Windows-based servers or Linux-based servers. Unless you know specifically what apps you want to use or what services you want to offer, then go for Linux-based servers. The majority of web hosting servers run on Linux. Linux is thought to be cheaper and more stable compared to Windows.

Technologies

The other thing to look for is that your web host offers PHP and MySQL. Most open source scripts are based on these two technologies. PHP is a programming language and MySQL is a database. Since most open source scripts are based on these, it will be easier for you and your customers to quickly set up free, ready-made websites such as web portals (Joomla, PHP Nuke, Geeklog), ecommerce websites (OS Commerce, CubeCart), blogs (Wordpress, b2evolution) and other software for niche businesses like classified ads (Noah’s Classifieds), auctions (PHPauction) and real estate (Open Realty). You will also be able to integrate open source scripts into an existing website. Forums (SMF, phpBB), image galleries (Coppermine Photo Gallery, 4Images Gallery) and mailing lists (PHP List) are examples of such scripts.

Any other technologies like Perl, Zend Optimizer, ImageMagick and Cron are a bonus but not essential.

Web Space and Bandwidth

With the emergence of videos and high resolution digital cameras, higher web space and bandwidth are required theses days. You should be looking at offering each personal user at least 1 gigabyte of disk space and 10 gigabytes of data transfer. Note that if you plan to have 100 customers, you don’t necessarily need to have 100 gb of disk space. Typically you can make do with 50 gb and oversell the space. It seems to be the norm now for large hosting providers to offer personal users in the region of 150 gb of disk space and 1 terabyte of bandwidth for under $10 per month. Unless you already run a very popular website you are unlikely to need so much space.

Web Host

Lastly, if you are still deciding which web host to choose, you may want to consider this web host reseller. They offer a private-label web host reseller service which will enable you to start your web hosting business quickly and for free.