Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in
Your question

Starting a new hosting company

Tags:
  • Control Panel
  • Business Computing
Last response: in Business Computing
Share
July 2, 2014 10:35:12 AM

Hello, if anyone who has an idea your advice and any recommendations would be great! Thank you.

Hello, I am looking into starting a game server hosting company and possible VPS's aswell. Now from my research, I can see there are 3 way's you can do it. Way 1, which is the cheapest. Run from your home PC and make your own control panel and not use a billing system and go from there. Way 2 (The way im doing it) Having a stating budget of £100 ($171) budget a month and getting a billing system and a proper control panel and off a proper dedicated server. Way 3 is having a budget of $25000 and going all out with loads of servers and a data centre.

To begin with the Billing system which I will use is WHMCS which will cost- $15.95 (£9.30).

The control panel which will be TCAdmin as I am very familiary with TCAdmin as I use to use it on a very regular basis will cost aswell, $15.95 (£9.30).

This is a total of $31.90 which is £18.60.

Next is the web hosting to run the website which sales will be - €4.95 (£3.97).

(This is excluding the domain name but that is not to worry)

This means these objects lead to a annual monthly fee of £22.57.

Now, for the dedicated server to run for the game servers to be on, I have chosen one which cost's $72.50 (£42.25) with the specifications of:

HP DL160
2X Xeon L5520 2.26Ghz Quad Core
16GB
2TB Of Hard Drive Space

I estimate it could fit about four customers paying the value of £15 each (Which I would estimate around a 40 slot ARMA 3 server from my testing) which is a very competitive price.

Obviously, as I have read it will take a LONG time to start seeing ANY profit coming in (up to 3 years if successful) which but of course to expand I will need investment (which I can get) to get more server's for more customers etc.

The games which I will most probably provide hosting for at first would be ARMA 3 and Garry's Mod and maybe some Minecraft (but I believe its a dying game but my advisors say otherwise :/ )

Any thoughts and potential improvements to my plans would be extremly appreciated!

Thanks

More about : starting hosting company

July 2, 2014 2:01:51 PM

What about the cost of your internet? its not like this will be a viable plan if you only have dsl available.

Server-wise I would say you're going to need more ram for future so might as well get it now and avoid downtime.

Things to also consider, which you probably have: Backup strategies. power systems (UPS's), site cooling, site fire suppression...
m
0
l
July 4, 2014 3:06:14 AM

>Way 1, which is the cheapest. Run from your home PC and make your own control panel and not use a billing system and go from there.

Hey, I tried this direction and it was awful.

Even if you have less than top of the line hardware, don't skimp on a secure (very important), responsive control panel and billing system.

It's easy to upgrade your hosting once you have money flowing in.

If I were you, I'd go with a high uptime VPS provider like linode (even if they're a bit more money) and a good control panel / billing platform like cpanel and whmcs. That leaves you less time fidling with your hosting and more time tweaking your appearance, SEO, marketing etc.

Please learn from my mistakes.
m
0
l
!