How to start a Hosting Company – Introduction
Introduction.
In the challenging times ahead Quickspace Hosting is putting a 5 part series together to help you start your own hosting company and provide you with the tools to get started.
We realize that a lot of people will be looking into getting some additional income in the months to come or possibly start their own business to create a main source of income. Online sales in most countries continued during this time and a lot of companies will look into expanding into the online environment and that means that they will need hosting providers to get them started. Online sales have seen steady growth year on year and will continue to do so and clients will need service providers to get them online. In this article, we will discuss the tools you need to start your hosting business and how Quickspace Hosting can help you achieve that.
The best part is that it very easy and you need very little capital to start a hosting company. Depending on the route you take it can be as little as investing R0 to R165 per month.
The first question we must address is that you do not need to have a technical background to start a hosting company. We will help you overcome some of that learning curve in this series.
So let’s look at what a hosting company does. A hosting company is a service provider, so they do not sell physical goods, but services. This already a big plus as you do not need to allot of capital to start a company that renders services, and like Quickspace, most hosting providers offer a reseller platform for easy entry into the market. Another big advantage is that you charge a monthly service fee and do not rely on shipping and shortages of physical goods. It also provides you with a good steady monthly income stream as most clients will stay with you during the life of their domain because moving to a new provider can be painful.
Hosting company provide 3 main services to clients.
- Domain Registration
- Website hosting space
- Email hosting space
- Website design (optional)
Let’s quickly discusses these 4 topics. We will go through them in more detail in future articles.
1. Domain Registration
This is the entry point for most clients. They need to register a domain name to start their online business. Businesses need a domain to host email and a website so that the public can contact them or place orders via their website. Domain registration services are offered by a lot of companies, and you can either go directly the top-level domain registrar to register a domain or start using a third party.
Taking South Africa’s .co.za domain as an example you would approach the ZA Central Registry (ZACR https://co.za) to start registering co.za domain names. This is as simple as sending them a preformatted email with the details of the domain and then making an EFT payment into their account.
In order to register a domain however you would need two name servers, we will discuss the role of these in more detail later, but do not be phased it’s a very simple concept to understand.
If you, however, go the reseller route then you will be registering domain though your partner and would not need to worry about name servers and direct registrations via ZACR, they would offer these services to you as part of your package.
2. Website hosting
Once you have registered a domain for your client they might require space to host a website. Website space is nothing more than hard drive space on a server that the website will occupy. This is measured in Megabytes or Gigabytes, more on this later. A good reseller package will already allocate you a pool of server space to start hosting your client’s website, else you would need your own server and allocate the space on the server according to the capacity of the servers hard drives.
3. Email hosting
Email is one of the biggest reasons a client would require a domain name. They would want a professional email address that reflects the name of their company. Although they might not require a website at first they are most likely going to get one in the near future once their email is up and running. Email hosting is much like website hosting you provide space on a server for clients to store their email. The difference is that email often takes up allot more space over time compared to a website.
4. Website Design
Not all hosting providers offer website design as a service, but you can offer this later as your company grows. Most hosting providers offer a free DIY platform for their clients to design their own websites but eventually, clients would need a professional website designed, and that service can only be provided by a Website Designer. Fortunately, you have options here, if you have the finances you could employ a designer or you could outsource the service to freelancers or a website design company that can work closely with you and your clients.
That is the basics of starting a Hosting company. In the days to come, we will go into more details on what tools you need and what services Quickspace Web Hosting can provide to help you get your company off the ground.
