How to create your own VPS hosting from scratch and start making money on it (introduction)

Hello, dear readers of Habr. With this material we begin a series of publications on how to build a VPS hosting from scratch based on the RUVDS White Label API .

In this introductory publication, we will explain what needs to be done first of all in order to start earning the first profit from your own VPS hosting as soon as possible, how to do it relatively quickly and as far as expedient and profitable. If you decide to create your own VPS hosting from scratch, but you don’t have your own infrastructure or you don’t have time and money to create it, welcome to Cat.
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You need a website

In order to organize your own VPS service, you first need 2 things - a website where you will offer VPS server rental services and a service provider that provides you with profitable partnership conditions, your infrastructure and a robust API with wide capabilities for this purpose. What is an API? This is a kind of interface, using which you can provide your customers with all the same server management capabilities that your service provider provides to their customers.

Integrating a site with your VPS provider through the API will be much cheaper and faster than creating your cloud infrastructure from scratch, as in this case it “takes on” many questions: you do not need to worry about the availability of sufficient resources from the provider, how to organize a wide and fault-tolerant channel for access to the Internet from virtual servers, how to collect and store data on resource usage by servers, and so on.

Now about the site. There may be many options, we list the most common:

• You are the owner of the site that offers related services (checking / registering domains, renting a DNS server, remote server administration).
• you create your website from scratch using the popular CMS and its plugins.
• you order the website from the web studio
• enter your version

The first one is the best option, since in order to add a new service for renting VPS servers, you will need only a few improvements: you will not have to write many things from scratch that are listed below. When you create your website from scratch, the launch dates can significantly change for the worse. You will need to self-implement all the components from the list below (or use third-party implementations, pre-testing and adapting them for your project). We recommend using the third option only if you do not have the necessary knowledge to create websites or cannot make your website the way you want.

We start

What should be implemented on this site?

Registration, user authentication / authorization, password recovery, feedback form.


All hosting providers have this, without exception. Your future client should be able to register, recover the password in case of loss, have a personal account on the site with up-to-date information about its balance, purchased servers, etc. Also, he must provide an opportunity to report a problem to technical support. In order to avoid mass registration of "fake" accounts, we recommend not to neglect additional protection tools, such as captcha on forms, and also to keep the maximum amount of available information about the user, which can help in case of detection of any violations on his part. In this case, there are many ready-made solutions that require minor modifications. If you plan to create your site on the basis of CMS, then the above described functionality is either implemented to some extent or easily connected using plug-ins.

Management of customer personal data



It should be implemented to some extent, but you can do without it. This functionality is not blocking the launch of your service.

Client server management



What should be on this page of your site depends on the extent to which you want to use the available functionality of your service provider and what control over the server you will provide to your client. For example, you can create a dedicated server for it after making the necessary amount on the balance and its written request to technical support, or you can provide it with a full-featured configurator to fine-tune server characteristics, as well as interfaces for changing configurations during operation, obtaining server load statistics, various features like reinstalling the OS and so on. The launch speed of your VPS hosting will vary significantly depending on the selected option. In more detail we will consider this question in the following articles from this cycle.

The possibility of using the test period



Obviously, for the initial promotion of your new VPS hosting service, you will need to realize the possibility of using a test period. This is necessary so that your client can decide for himself how much the VPS rental price you offer corresponds to the quality of the services you provide. What needs to be considered at implementation? First of all, you need to select the number of days. You should not make the test period too long - customers who just want to get a free server for a certain period will register on your service, and after the test period is completed, they will register a new account and try to use the test period again. In order to protect you from such clients to a certain extent, you definitely need to learn how to identify them. This is especially important at the initial stage of development of your service, as because of each such client you will receive less of the potential profit. It should also be borne in mind that a long test period will not be very profitable for you, since there is no test period on your partner account to which all the servers you have created are attached.

Billing



And how customers will replenish the balance and buy the server? Of course, we will need another very important component, this is billing. What do we include in the concept of "billing"? Of course, it includes the creation / editing of current tariffs, interfaces for accepting customer payments, internal payment processing mechanisms, creating promotions / discounts, monitoring tools.

The implementation of your own or integration into your third-party billing project is particularly responsible, as the ability to purchase a VPS server on your site directly depends on the performance of this component (read your first money). To quickly start accepting money from the most popular payment systems, we recommend you use payment aggregators. Why? First, integrating with one aggregator is much faster and easier than with each of the payment systems it provides. This is due to the fact that each payment system has its own interaction protocol, which needs to be correctly implemented and unified work with it inside your system, which is extremely time-consuming. Secondly, you have one interface that provides most of the necessary functionality for working with customer payments - this is the personal office of the aggregator. Of course, for all this you will have to pay an additional commission, but in our opinion, this solution is optimal when creating your own VPS service.

Of course, before integration with the payment aggregator, your site must meet certain requirements. As an example, the requirements for the paymaster payment aggregator:

• the site must be completely filled with information, function;
• the site must consist of more than one page;
• the site should contain information about the goods and services being sold, as well as the value of these goods and services;
• the site should not be hosted on a free hosting;
• goods and services offered on the site should not contradict the current legislation of the Russian Federation and international law;

Also, you should pay attention to the fact that the list of payment systems, as a rule, is much wider if you enter into an agreement as a legal entity. In some cases, the connection of certain payment systems can take quite a long time, since your site must meet the requirements of each payment system provided by the aggregator, and the verification procedure is performed on the side of the payment system.

Financial aspect

We have come to one of the most important aspects (if not the most important) - financial. Working with your VPS provider should be beneficial. Let's calculate why it is profitable to organize the rental service of VPS servers by choosing a provider as a service provider.

Let's take the most popular VPS configurations based on the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system and provide some data that we obtained when analyzing the VPS services market in Russia as of February 2016:

Configuration	one	2	3	four	five
Number of processors	one	2	four	6	eight
RAM, GB	one	2	four	eight	sixteen
Disk capacity, GB, HDD	20	40	120	300	600
Number of IPv4 Addresses	one	one	one	one	one
Current configuration price
When paying for a month	300 r.	600 r.	1400 r.	2980 r.	5720 r.
When paying for the year	2880 r.	5760 r.	13440 r.	28608 r.	54912 r.

In order to estimate your potential earnings, we give the gain at the price of the configurations before the average price of competitors:

	one	2	3	four	five
When you pay the server for a month	474.14 p.	759.13 r.	794.40 p.	1160.24 p.	3444.85 r.
When you pay the server for a year	328.61 r.	601.23 p.	621.31 r.	966.30 p.	3160.57 r.

Also, do not forget that we have the costs of paying the commission for the transfer and withdrawal of payment systems.

	one	2	3	four	five
When you pay the server for a month	40 r.	120 r.	240 r.	472 r.	624 p.
When you pay the server for a year	36 r.	108 p.	216 r.	424.8 p.	561.6 r.

The current discount for creating servers using the API is 10% .
How to estimate potential earnings from one server of a given configuration, purchased for a month? You can use the following formula:
Earnings = Tech. RUVDS price * 10% + Difference with averaged configuration - Expenses for payment of commissions.

Calculation example for configuration 3:

Earnings = 1400 * 0.1 + 794 (rounded down) -240 = 694 rubles .

This is earnings from one server. When your customers purchase 25-30 servers of such a configuration, you go out to the amount of earnings already at 20 thousand rubles a month .

In the following articles we will tell in details about the possibilities of the RUVDS White Label API , discuss how to choose the best tariffs for your VPS hosting and on what conditions you can earn.