How I started and finished hosting
I have been selling hosting for several years, and during this time I have gained invaluable experience in communication with clients and server administration. Now I want to tell you how it was :)
It was a long time ago, I was much younger and hosting services were more expensive then. And one day I discovered that there was such a service - reselling, which allowed selling a place to others. In addition, by purchasing a gigabyte of space for several people, it was possible to take a place for the site two and a half times cheaper. I immediately wrote about this to a friend, and we agreed that he will take 200 megabytes, a friend will take 300, I take 100 and for the rest of the buyer I am looking for.
According to the law of the genre, it turned out that I got the whole gigabyte.
I did not refuse and cancel the order, I found a person who would design me for a hosting and some money, wrote texts and made a website. I found a pirate billing, set it up and went to look for customers at HostObzor.
')
I immediately honestly said that I am a reseller (Anyway, in the second or third post it would be found out and not very well presented). Afterwards, I was always honest with customers and said if something went wrong.
Until May everything was going quite well, I even stayed in a small plus. I bought a license for billing and did the stupidest thing I could have done - I went to Ukraine to places where the Internet was not even held at all.
Several times a month I went to ICQ from my phone and checked my mail. By the way, customers knew about it. One day I was informed that the client sites were not working, and a little later I learned that the hoster had sold to a larger one. I went to an internet cafe, asked what should be done to make the sites work again. It was necessary to change the DNS records of my domain, and then everything would work. I did not have time and gave the passwords to technical support, they did everything for me. Then it turned out that the sites still did not work, because they were crookedly transferred. Food again, I communicate with support. After a couple of days, the websites started to work, but it was already too late - almost all the customers left.
In August, I returned to Moscow again. I looked at the new control panel (It was DirectAdmin, became cPanel), corrected the links on the site. I decided to transfer technical support of clients from ICQ to a ticket holder. By the way, they even wrote a couple of messages to it, but all the questions went to ICQ anyway. The situation was not very good.
So it was until I accidentally met one person. We talked, and he suggested that I make him design for the site for a free virtual dedicated server with a panel. Did, got the server. With another panel - IspManager.
Here began to gain a real useful experience. I learned to put this panel and rearrange it again, because something was surely going wrong. When everything worked more or less, I manually transferred my clients. Made a new site. The panel often gave out inexplicable glitches, I could not get some sites to work. Besides, he rested in memory. Increased memory, I bought a license for DirectAdmin and set.
From the third time it turned out great - I liked everything, nothing fell, instead of mod_php there was a safer suphp, there were no errors and everything worked. I installed a firewall, transferred clients, everyone was happy and happy. Sites worked quickly, for help I sometimes turned to the server owner, everything fell only once. Began to come new customers.
There were new acquaintances, I again began to communicate with the owner of the first hosting. And the owner decided to go to the company, which sold the first and gave them the same node. At the same time no one wanted to post me. As a result, I took a new VDS in Moscow at a discount and the ability to pay when the money comes. So they lived.
He went to Ukraine again, but now there was inexpensive internet. Began to work remotely php-coder to pay off the debt. Extinguished Found that you can place a php mirror in yourself, wrote that I can do it.
Already in Moscow, the answer came to me - well, do it, it will be cool. And this is how I began to post a site that made 300 gigabytes of traffic per month and almost did not load the server. In gratitude, a pass-through link from the mirror and a link from the site’s mirrors page were placed on my site (And there was PageRank 7, by the way). So they lived, PageRank rose to four.
Everything was great until I had no money left to pay for the server. Since there were not very many customers, I just gave them up for thanks and didn’t even ask for money. They are satisfied with my choice of buyer :). I am currently working in technical support for a medium-sized hoster. I have no regrets about the time and money I spent, I gained invaluable experience in communicating with clients and setting up servers, I met interesting people.
PS Moral: Always keep your customers up to date with what you are doing. Never give up customers for more than three days (Even that is a lot). Do not experiment on live clients. Do not move to a higher level (From reselling to VDS or from VDS to Dedic), if the first one does not pay off and there are resources.
PPS I can write about what is needed in order to start providing hosting, but I can cover only the technical side. Is it interesting?
It was a long time ago, I was much younger and hosting services were more expensive then. And one day I discovered that there was such a service - reselling, which allowed selling a place to others. In addition, by purchasing a gigabyte of space for several people, it was possible to take a place for the site two and a half times cheaper. I immediately wrote about this to a friend, and we agreed that he will take 200 megabytes, a friend will take 300, I take 100 and for the rest of the buyer I am looking for.
According to the law of the genre, it turned out that I got the whole gigabyte.
I did not refuse and cancel the order, I found a person who would design me for a hosting and some money, wrote texts and made a website. I found a pirate billing, set it up and went to look for customers at HostObzor.
')
I immediately honestly said that I am a reseller (Anyway, in the second or third post it would be found out and not very well presented). Afterwards, I was always honest with customers and said if something went wrong.
Until May everything was going quite well, I even stayed in a small plus. I bought a license for billing and did the stupidest thing I could have done - I went to Ukraine to places where the Internet was not even held at all.
Several times a month I went to ICQ from my phone and checked my mail. By the way, customers knew about it. One day I was informed that the client sites were not working, and a little later I learned that the hoster had sold to a larger one. I went to an internet cafe, asked what should be done to make the sites work again. It was necessary to change the DNS records of my domain, and then everything would work. I did not have time and gave the passwords to technical support, they did everything for me. Then it turned out that the sites still did not work, because they were crookedly transferred. Food again, I communicate with support. After a couple of days, the websites started to work, but it was already too late - almost all the customers left.
In August, I returned to Moscow again. I looked at the new control panel (It was DirectAdmin, became cPanel), corrected the links on the site. I decided to transfer technical support of clients from ICQ to a ticket holder. By the way, they even wrote a couple of messages to it, but all the questions went to ICQ anyway. The situation was not very good.
So it was until I accidentally met one person. We talked, and he suggested that I make him design for the site for a free virtual dedicated server with a panel. Did, got the server. With another panel - IspManager.
Here began to gain a real useful experience. I learned to put this panel and rearrange it again, because something was surely going wrong. When everything worked more or less, I manually transferred my clients. Made a new site. The panel often gave out inexplicable glitches, I could not get some sites to work. Besides, he rested in memory. Increased memory, I bought a license for DirectAdmin and set.
From the third time it turned out great - I liked everything, nothing fell, instead of mod_php there was a safer suphp, there were no errors and everything worked. I installed a firewall, transferred clients, everyone was happy and happy. Sites worked quickly, for help I sometimes turned to the server owner, everything fell only once. Began to come new customers.
There were new acquaintances, I again began to communicate with the owner of the first hosting. And the owner decided to go to the company, which sold the first and gave them the same node. At the same time no one wanted to post me. As a result, I took a new VDS in Moscow at a discount and the ability to pay when the money comes. So they lived.
He went to Ukraine again, but now there was inexpensive internet. Began to work remotely php-coder to pay off the debt. Extinguished Found that you can place a php mirror in yourself, wrote that I can do it.
Already in Moscow, the answer came to me - well, do it, it will be cool. And this is how I began to post a site that made 300 gigabytes of traffic per month and almost did not load the server. In gratitude, a pass-through link from the mirror and a link from the site’s mirrors page were placed on my site (And there was PageRank 7, by the way). So they lived, PageRank rose to four.
Everything was great until I had no money left to pay for the server. Since there were not very many customers, I just gave them up for thanks and didn’t even ask for money. They are satisfied with my choice of buyer :). I am currently working in technical support for a medium-sized hoster. I have no regrets about the time and money I spent, I gained invaluable experience in communicating with clients and setting up servers, I met interesting people.
PS Moral: Always keep your customers up to date with what you are doing. Never give up customers for more than three days (Even that is a lot). Do not experiment on live clients. Do not move to a higher level (From reselling to VDS or from VDS to Dedic), if the first one does not pay off and there are resources.
PPS I can write about what is needed in order to start providing hosting, but I can cover only the technical side. Is it interesting?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/60920/
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