About hosting in RuNet from the inside

A year ago, I wrote about my experience in running a free hosting.
Now I want to talk about paid hosting. I have much more experience in this.

Legality
Approximately, 90% of hosting providers in runet work without a license for telematics.
It is understandable. This is the most difficult link in the chain of deployment of hosting.
Probably, this is even a protest of Russian hosters. Indeed, in the USA, Germany, in [in] Ukraine and in general in most countries there is no such hemorrhoids with obtaining a license and handing over the communications center.
Most often, the stages of creating a hosting look like this:
1. Leases a server. If abroad, a little cheaper and safer in terms of legality.
2. One of the panels is installed on the server: ISPmanager, DirectAdmin and [less often the first two] CPanel.
3. Billing is also installed: BPanel, CEpanel, RootPanel or ISP BILLmanager.
4. And create a site. More often on a pattern [of which there are thousands in the network]. And, voila - hosting is ready to accept customers.
Many novice hosters spare money even for an SSL certificate.

Competition
Probably, the hosting market is one of the most competitive markets in Russia.
The fact is that in RuNet there are more than 1000 hosting sites, where everyone is charged with 1-2 people.
This leads to rabid dumping and, accordingly, overselling [roughly speaking, on a server that can withstand 100 average clients, 200 places are sold].
Dumping, indeed, is becoming inconceivable. You are ready to give hosting for free for almost a month. They give you a full-fledged hosting for $ 0.5 per month - in general, they are doing everything to get a client.

Customer minds
I was always surprised that the majority saves on hosting.
The average tariff plan now costs 90 rubles. This, attention, 3 rubles a day!
So, in fact, it is on such tariff plans that most commercial sites are hosted.
When the hosting falls and rolls one day, customer losses can amount to thousands of rubles.
And what a hoster? The hoster receives from you for this day 3 rubles and you really hope for 100% uptime?
To keep you for 3 rubles a day, the hoster has to go on numerous tricks.
As I wrote above, your site for that kind of money does not end up in a luxurious house or even in a Khrushchevka.
For the money he lives in a hostel and no one gives any guarantees about your neighbors.
')
Accommodation
I managed to live with the servers in the following data centers:
eServer.ru [M-101], hosting.ua, burst.NET, hetzner.de, nac.net, web-dc.
It should be noted that I have never had my own servers.
I rented them.
One can argue about this for a long time, but I remain convinced that at current prices for placement and the frequency of equipment failures, it is more profitable for small companies to rent a server.

Technical support
Among many there is an opinion that the support of hosting users is tedious and difficult.
In fact, support is one of the least disturbing things.
A year and a half ago, at the peak of my own, so to speak, hosting career, I had about 1,000 clients.
They were distributed on 10 servers [in three different countries].
So, the support itself did not even take a full hour a day.
It is much more problematic to follow unfortunate webmasters with badly unoptimized scripts.
Woe webmasters I would divide into two categories:
- those that break the rules
- those that overload the server.
The first ones are usually detected by knocking, but sometimes it takes a lot of time to calculate the second.

Backups
It is obvious that even if the contract does not stipulate the obligation of the host to monitor the safety of files, it is in his interest to have a fresh copy of all files in another data center.
I formatted the main disk twice by mistake!
The third time we found a fire in the hosting center hosting.ua
Then many were burned by the fact that they kept backups in the same DC.
We, fortunately, kept backups in the United States. Recovery took about three days.

Test period
When launching one hosting project, I decided to try to thoroughly promote the fact that the first week of hosting at any rate is free. And what do you think?
For several months, I received about 300 unique orders of the test period. Not bad, yes.
But! Not more than 15 people have passed from the test period to the paid one!
I do not know why so far large hostings practice free test periods.
First, it is fertile ground for any evil spirits like phishers and spammers.
Secondly, the real client takes the hosting and starts using it, and does not bother with the reduced test accounts. So, this trick was unsuccessful.

Nervado
Obviously, each server downtime causes a lot of stress.
It is during technical problems that you have questions and send rays of diarrhea with a force of 100,500 cd.
When hundreds of sites do not work, you can not go to bed.
You spend days and nights restoring work.
This is probably the main disadvantage of this business - responsibility disproportionate to revenues.

Profitability
If you develop hosting over the years and according to plan, you can get a good profitability.
The maximum that worked for me was 200%. But I almost invested everything there, in expansion and advertising.
And, to tell the truth, I managed to promote hosting to the middle one quickly enough.
Most hosters in runet do not even recruit 100 clients. Proof .
By the way, in the hosting, too, 20% of customers pay more than everyone else :)
And no more than a third of customers use most of the allocated resources.

Thanks for attention. This is purely my experience, so I can be wrong. I hope you were interested.