Is Web Hosting a Profitable Business?

Web hosting is one of the fast businesses where you are either rewarded with immediate success or immediate failure. There are tons of factors that goes into making your hosting initiative a success or failure. The top factors that drive your company towards achieving success and profits are:

• Quality of service
• Good marketing strategy
• Uptime reliability
• Hosting packages that you offer and
• Competitive pricing of packages

Quality of Service – This is the top most factor that impacts your business to a great extent. There are many mediums of support that one can offer to their customers such as phone, email, ticketing system based support which are the most common ones. If your response if fast enough and you resolve the problem as soon as they are reported, you may expect to retain customers over a long period of time. This is one area, when properly looked into and taken care of, will boost your business to new heights.

Good Marketing Strategy – Don’t worry if you are not a marketing genius, hire someone who will do it right for you. There are many ways of marketing that one can look at to achieve better results and ROI. You should not expect to just open a hosting company and customers knowing about it and automatically standing in line to buy a hosting account from you. You will have to invest in publicizing your company and brand name for initial period and reach as many people as possible.

Uptime Reliability – Customers no longer are limited to just dozens of hosting providers, the market is as big as over 40,000 companies worldwide who offer similar solutions that you do. Many customer are driven away by poor uptime that their hosting companies maintains. If you are just another hosting company who thinks that an uptime of over 50% is good enough, think again. Industry standards are well over 99.99% now a days and to stay in the business, you will have to meet those numbers. As a startup business, buy reseller plans from big and reliable companies and resell it to your customers. This will be cost effective and when you grow big enough, look at buying your own servers.

Hosting Packages and Competitive Pricing – 5 years ago, 100MB of space used to cost a minimum of $10 a month but now a days $10 per month gives you 3-5GB of web space and that too with a lot of extra features. You will have to spend a lot of time working on what packages you will offer and still stay competitive and profitable with your offerings.

Please post your thoughts in the comments section below.