Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 17:44:31 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Daniel Frazier" <dfrazier@magpage.com>, "Jonathan Hilgeman" <JHilgeman@ecx.com> Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Starting a Web Hosting Company Message-ID: <000101c12c35$efea8ee0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <3B8492C5.50136B6D@magpage.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Daniel Frazier >Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 10:21 PM >To: Jonathan Hilgeman >Cc: 'freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG' >Subject: Re: Starting a Web Hosting Company > > >Jonathan Hilgeman wrote: >> >> Hi, >> I've been considering starting my own, small, web hosting business using >> FreeBSD. So far I have a short list of essential items: >> Name Server (primary and secondary) >> Mail Server >> Machine to Host Files (File Server) > >if you wanna start real small one machine will be enough. just >collocate it at an isp and usually they'll handle dn., mail, etc... a >good portion of the servers collocated with the isp I work for are for >smaller web hosting providers. > Ditto here - and keep in mind that you won't make any money as a smaller hoster unless your also working on people's websites for them. The smaller hosters fill a niche because they can do things to their server that are way too customized for the larger ISP's like us to bother with. There's a group of customers out there that want and need that and will happily pay someone else to do it for them. But, if your thinking that your going to just offer stripped down hosting services then your joining a large community of mostly bankrupt dot-bombs and Telcos that already tried that. There's a few survivors out of that group like Hostsave but the ones that did survive are dealing in the $5-per-month sites at thousands of them per server. The lesson to be learned here is you want to be spending all your time and effort on just the webserver itself and the backend on it. Rather than worrying about whether you need nameservices you should be worrying about whether you should start out with Postgres or MySQL, and worrying about whether the HTML editor that your going to be using is up to the task. Concentrate on finding a few customers that are willing to pay you a lot of money and just shed the easy crap like mail and DNS off to the ISP and pass the minimal charges through to the customers. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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