How to start a hosting company

Starting a web hosting company has become much more streamlined in 2020, thanks to an increasing amount of technology, control panel software, and resources now more accessible than ever before.

If you are curious about starting your very own web hosting company, in this post we will go over the different types of hosting services so you can make an informed decision about your potential product offerings.

Shared Hosting Explained:

Shared hosting is a basic type of hosting service – and typically a service an individual or new business would opt for. Shared hosting typically houses websites that receive a small amount of traffic. When websites/businesses outgrow the shared hosting environment, they tend to upgrade to a virtual private server (or also known as a VPS – which we explain further down below).

Reseller Hosting Explained:

Reseller hosting is one step above a shared hosting service. While similar to shared hosting, oftentimes reseller hosting resources are a lot more healthier. A reseller hosting account allows you to create additional sub-users (additional hosting accounts), which allows for you to start selling hosting accounts to your customers, without the worry of managing your own server (no technical background or experience is required). If you are looking to begin selling shared hosting accounts, a reseller hosting account would be a good start. Keep in mind that reseller hosting accounts do not offer root access though, meaning you have very limited control over the server itself and would be reliant upon your hosting provider to make any server-wide changes. You would also want to consider a billing platform to help automate account provisioning, billing and much more. We’d recommend WHMCS for this. Like what you’re hearing but want to know the next level? A better alternative would be getting your own VPS, which we explain below.

VPS Hosting Explained:

A virtual private server provides you with more control, as you receive full root/administrator SSH access to your server. How does a VPS work? A dedicated server hosts multiple virtual servers, each isolated from the others. The isolation is accomplished with hypervisor software (such as KVM). The hypervisor software properly segments the physical server and keeps each segment (VPS server) separate from the rest — this way, other virtual private servers hosted within the same physical host are unable to view your files or make impacting changes to your server.

Each VPS runs its own operating system (again, independent of the other virtual machines (VMs) hosted upon the physical server) – the result? Each VPS is own independent server. Each VPS can also be rebooted independently.

A simple explanation of a VPS is this real-life example. Picture a large pizza (the dedicated server). Each pizza slice (the VPS) varies in size (hardware resources). As your slice is independent, you are isolated from other slices.

A VPS is more cost-effective than a dedicated server, but also offers less resources than you’d receive with one. A common use case for a VPS is a growing website/business that demands more resources than what shared hosting can offer. Also, for those who are looking to start a web hosting company that offers both shared and reseller hosting – a VPS can be a great choice. You can install a control panel software (such as DirectAdmin) on your VPS server in order to accomplish this.

Dedicated Server Explained:

A dedicated server is true to its name — in essence, a dedicated server is a physical server housed within a datacenter where the hardware resources are fully dedicated to you. Dedicated servers typically offer larger resource capacity than most virtual private servers.

A medium to large sized business would typically host their websites & applications based upon a dedicated server. Additionally, if you are looking to start a web hosting company (or are already running one), with a dedicated server – you can split these up into slices (as we explained above using hypervisor software) and begin selling VPS hosting services yourself.

Looking to start selling VPS? A dedicated server is the way to go, feel free to contact us for some server configurations that are tailored to be purposed as VPS nodes.

Questions? Need some direction? Want to be successful?

Whether you are looking to start your own web hosting company, or are looking to host a website and just not entirely sure which direction to take – please feel free to contact RackNerd’s experts for help. We can guide you every step of the way and custom tailor a solution to accomplish your goals.

RackNerd can be contacted by clicking here, or by phone at 888-881-NERD.