amuck-landowner

Why the hosting industry and what made you stay?

hellogoodbye

New Member
(Sorry for the lame title, it was really hard trying to condense the gist of this post into a simple topic. :))

I was reading through the other thread about your biggest pains as a provider and it got me wondering... with all the different issues you face in operating a VPS business as of late - especially when you're one of the small to moderate sized companies - what motivates you to keep going? What is your favourite aspect of being a hosting provider despite the costs, the possible hardware issues and DDoS attacks, the demanding customers who want dirt cheap prices, 100% uptime and would not hesitate to accuse you of scamming at the drop of a hat?

And while we're at it, what prompted you to start your own VPS business in the first place? Were you aware of what you were getting into and still decided to take the plunge anyway? Or did it seem relatively easy/straightforward at first and became a much more complicated process than you were expecting?
 

MannDude

Just a dude
vpsBoard Founder
Moderator
Good thread, I was going to create something similar but haven't gotten to it.

I don't operate a provider so I'll just sit back and learn. :popcorn:
 

MCH-Phil

New Member
Verified Provider
Became interested many years ago in technology. Was luckily immersed in tech at a very young age. Think 5-6 y/o and has been my greatest passion since.

Fast forward to 2000 or so and I met up with a local guy who was, at the time, running a free web hosting service. At the time, very few free web hosting providers offered the same features you'd see standard today with paid accounts. That was how we grew. With multiple tiers of service etc. It was a great time. Things paid for themselves. We, at the time, paid for full management from our dedicated server provider but somehow was on the hook for an open mail relay and we were forcefully shutdown.

One word, passion.
 

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
Well, I linger.  I am a long time wholesale purchaser, colo hoster, etc.  Cut my teeth in the ISP world and BBS world decades ago.

I operate VPS instances, but not for anyone can sign up VPS model and certainly nothing to do with the $7/mo illusionary market.

Hopefully more folks have stories about real business model experience and less trying to undercut McDonald's on a 59 cent hamburger VPS.  The later is horror and disgrace to real business (i.e. not sustainable at scale to pay and be legitimate company with legal tax compliance, employing real people, providing real support) --- yeah cut me the slack about the single operator super heroes out there who eventually will become disinterested/sick/tired/etc. and crumble.

Data as a general industry always interested me.  It has become the predominant distribution medium, surpassing broadcast over the air and printed media.   You must have good distribution to be viable in many businesses.  Being a distribution provider is the modern utility model.
 

vRozenSch00n

Active Member
Just like most people, got into computers/technlogy at a very young age. Started hosting game servers as a hobby and slowly turned into a business/source of income.
Aaah, that explains your name. Tragic is your handle name in gaming, isn't it?
 

Awmusic12635

Active Member
Verified Provider
Lets see:

Was introduced and into computers at a young age, built a computer together with my father sometime before kindergarten (I don't remember the exact age) and enjoyed the experience.

I started my first website in middle school at the time made using freewebs.com (which became webs.com later). It was a game related website for a online game that I enjoyed playing and it grew to becoming pretty popular over time. Once I outgrew the game I became interested in a lot of technology in general and wanted to do more than just a site builder could provide. I signed up for bluehost account for a year, which I ended up moving past pretty fast (didn't last a year). I started a tech blog with a friend of mine. We got pretty good at it, 12+ well written articles a day about either tech news or very well written and graphic guides for various apple devices. Bluehost, as you know, has no problem throttling your server for excessive CPU usage when your site grows in traffic. It got to a point where my account was being throttled 75% of the day and I grew tired of it. I picked up my very first VPS with volume drive, their 4GB RAM OVZ plan. I didn't know much about linux at the time so it took a bit of learning as I went but all went pretty good for a few months. I split the cost with 2 friends of mine (from online) since at the time I did not have a consistent source of income. After about 6 months problems started appearing with the VPS. Lots of either being overloaded where I would have to emergency email them to fix their shit because the node was overloaded. Because of these problems our server was barely usable. I convinced the two friends that were sharing the cost to contribute a bit more (I covered most of it) to upgrade to one of VD's dedicated servers because then the node couldn't be overloaded because we controlled it. This worked great for a long time but the costs started to add up. Since we had cPanel on one of VD's E3 deals the cost wasn't crazy high but for my level of income it took a decent amount of my money to have this server. I tried to find ways to offload this cost somewhere and it came into my mind that I could sell extra space on this server that we were not using. I sold a few basic "unlimited" shared hosting plans, then later changed to fixed limits because I realized this is one of the reasons I had hated Bluehost. I begin to think that I might be able to make some extra income from doing this and have fun doing it to. I first started doing it with friends I knew so that if I messed up they would understand and I would learn from it. 

Fastforward to June of 2011 and I had decided that I knew enough to start a basic shard hosting business. I racked my brain for ideas for a name but it took a while. Then when riding my bike around the neighborhood I thought of the name that would become Fliphost. On June 27th 2011 Fliphost.net was born.

First version of the Fliphost website (I still cry from how bad it is):

maxresdefault.jpg

Note: That is not me in the to right corner, that is someone I gave free hosting to in return for frequent exposure on his youtube channel, which worked out pretty well.

Linux continued to intrigue me for a while. I had planned to use the income that I got from Fliphost to explore other technology that I could otherwise not afford. I would frequently browse online and at some point a person introduced me to webhostingtalk which really began to spike my interest more in web hosting. Virtualization began to peak my interest. I knew this would be much more difficult than what I was currently doing and did not want to mess it up. I did research on it for a month or two and decided I didn't know enough to start but I still wanted to eventually get there. I began to resell burstnet VPS, to gain more experience and because this provided more income than shared hosting which would allow me to afford my own node in the future when it became better money wise to host directly on my own node than resell theirs. One day after deciding I was reselling enough (around 40-60) at the time I decided it was time for my own node. I signed up with ioflood in AZ for one node due to his previous help and suggestions on WHT. I manually migrated all customers off of the resold burstnet servers to my new node to reclaim all the profit, I would later learn the lesson of not overcommiting your resources / capital. I twice bought an additional node when I thought I was going to need it but canceled after a month when it did not become needed. I did later expand to a 2nd node with ioflood. (My first LET offer is with ioflood if you look through my post history there). I had a wonderful time at ioflood and Gabe probably offered the best and most personalized support I ever had there. Sadly the pricing became not right for what I wanted to do and then later moved to ace-host in Michigan with one of their large E5 nodes which I sold off of for a while ( pretty sure I have LET offer from there too).

At this place I started to offer MC hosting as a hobby really, I was interested in the game and a few people I knew were so I had space and got a multicraft license. I later on moved from ace-host to Incero and split the large E5 up into smaller E3 servers which performed much better, and gave MC its own server which had been giving my E5 IO problems before. At this point in time almost by accident my MC business jumped up in popularity pretty fast. I saw a tweet on twitter about a person looking for a possible affiliate deals related to their MC website. I thought what the heck, nothing to lose. I contacted them and turns out they were the person that owned minecraftservers.com , I near perfect SEO website for the hosting and a very well made website. We struck a affiliate deal, that all things related to hosting would have order links to my servers. I was selling MC hosting @ $16 per GB at a time when everyone else was racing to the bottom and didn't have to change any prices because of this deal. At peak I hosted around 200 of servers @ $16 per GB with no advertising effort required by me, solely because of the deal. At some point the site owner decided to break it off so we did (gave me an excuse to stop offering it) I had begun to notice I hated MC support, 13 year olds with parent credit cards who know nothing about using their server.

I then had a period of adding a bunch of new things. Started offering SSD hosting, high storage servers in 2012 because I saw a need , backups and a bunch of new stuff because I believed more in making something I could be proud of than making a large profit from it (So I reinvested most of what I made). Fastforward I did a lot of research of KVM again because that also interested me and now I offer that in LA.

Here where just a few months ago, the business I started as a way to have fun and learn from the process, Fliphost was acquired / merged with Query Foundry LLC (owns Cloud Shards). Now we offer dedicated servers, colo, have fully owned hardware + network and have nowhere to go but up. I am really excited for what we have in store.

I don't normally rant on like this and I am pretty sure I have not written this much about my story in one place before. I guess that is because I am proud of what I have done and the great time I have had doing it. I just completed my first semester in college going for an IT major and without starting web hosting I am not sure I would be as confident about what I want to do for future as I am now.

Also if you are curious I have put the below a timeline of the various Fliphost websites:

1st: HERE

2nd: HERE

3rd: HERE

And of course the best and newest for last

4th: HERE

TL:DR:

I wanted learn more about tech and I believed I could do it better than the crap hosting from bluehost + volumedrive I was getting
 
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hellogoodbye

New Member
Wow, I wasn't expecting such a detailed response (even though I was hoping for one), so before I say anything else, thank you! As someone who had hosted a couple of hobby sites with GoDaddy and Fat Cow before, trust me when I say I understand what you mean about crap hosting. That was the reason why I decided to look into other options and took the plunge into VPS hosting myself. I guess I should count myself lucky that there are so many options available nowadays in terms of providers and plans, but at the same time it's a ridiculously daunting task to even pick one provider just so I can get started on learning some basic Linux.

The screencaps of all the transformations your site went through was a nice visual touch, and it's evident just reading what you wrote that you're very proud of what you accomplished. I would be too if I were you! :)
 

javaj

New Member
I was a gamer and was always pretty interested in computers/technology, I started hosting, (well my own) around 97 or 98, it all began when I ended up looking for porn on AOL one night and found a website called The Hun's Yellow Pages which was arguably the largest adult website online at the time, it was pretty much the PornHub of today. Looked at some of the pages, but after going thru a few galleries I wondered who the hell does this stuff, who puts it all together? So i browsed more on that front page and found this link for webmasters, intrigued, I clicked on the link, at that got me started in the online adult industry.

Anyway, to make a long story short, after clicking this link I kept investigating and soon learned how to be an adult "webmaster" basically starting, running, building and hosting my own websites and putting galleries together which I submitted to other adult websites for traffic and money.

This lasted for several years and I enjoyed the hell out of it, nothing like working from home sitting at a desk and working in your underwear, meeting and partying with some of the biggest household names in the industry, and I was making really really good money too. And if you think there is drama on hosting and vps web boards, just get on some in the adult industry with coked out producers and pornstars, they make hosting drama look like pleasant conversation, literally.

Anyway after several years of this, and kind of having to keep most of what I was doing vague for my rather conservative family I came to the realization that some day if I had kids, I would some day have to explain how I paid for their happy meals.

So, I slowly decided it was time to go looking for a new industry, I already designed and hosted a few websites for a few friends and family so I knew if I went and found a few more clients I could possibly start a new business.

Well its been since around 2003-2004 that I have been developing, hosting and designing websites for a lot of local clients, I also do some contract server administration for a local company, I have never really put up a company website because I never really needed one, pretty much every client I have or inherited has been pretty much from word of mouth, nice to have clients who have stayed with you for awhile, they can be almost better than the yellow pages, literally.

I can't say I make all of my money from web hosting so I probably don't count, much of it comes from contract work and new design or development clients and some of my bigger clients are mainly in the precious metals industry.

I have been looking at going into vps hosting since I had some work slow down, I have some health issues going on with someone in my family so I have not really pulled the trigger yet so to speak, kind of seeing how stuff pans out on that since its been iffy, but we'll see.

----

Wow, I just realized me and FlipHost have left novels lol. I can vouch for FlipHost, they are a great host btw...
 
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tragic

Member
Verified Provider
@Flipost, that's an amazing background/story. I love hearing from other providers who turned a hobby into a business.
 

hellogoodbye

New Member
Anyway after several years of this, and kind of having to keep most of what I was doing vague for my rather conservative family I came to the realization that some day if I had kids, I would some day have to explain how I paid for their happy meals.
I lol-ed when I read this part. But seriously, I really appreciate you taking your time to tell your story! I'm just happy people are responding at all, and seeing such detailed accounts is even better.

(I was just saying to my friend the other day that there really is drama everywhere on the internet and here you are adding more confirmation. I can only imagine what sort of drama exists in the adult industry... though I don't think I actually care enough to take a gander and see for myself  :lol:)
 

javaj

New Member
@hellogoodbye

Yeah there really is drama pretty much everywhere online.

And it is kinda funny after all these years, that I do have a daughter now and I can avoid what would be a rather unpleasant a maybe a bit embarrassing conversation B)
 

mehulagrawaal

New Member
I had launched my website 2 years ago and was hosting it with other server providers. I liked their business so i though to start my own hosting business and the reason i stayed here is trying to provide the best service... :)
 

HostGuard

New Member
Verified Provider
I'm in it to use technology to improve lives, whether that's through IT or games, I don't know sometimes. ;)

My Dad had his own PC shop and I spent my school holidays there learning to build PCs. It's all come natural to me.
 

raindog308

vpsBoard Premium Member
Moderator
Different story here.

I've been working with computers since before CRTs were common - first machine I played on when I was ~9 was a machine where every time you hit return, a green bar printer advanced :)  Altair, TRS-80, Apple ][e, Commodore, etc. to the present.  Been in the IT field since ~1990, most of that on big enterprise Unix iron.  Lately been doing more big database stuff (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server) and writing code (perl, python, Java, etc.)

Thought about the hosting industry (as in starting a host) very seriously for several years, but never took the plunge.  Even ran a blog (which hasn't been updated in ~1 year) about it called StartupSaga.com.  Towards the last half of last year I realized it probably wasn't going to happen.

Main reasons:

1. The market is hugely glutted and it's my perception that there isn't anything different about thousands and thousands of hosts.  

2. The product is very commodity, and even worse, very non-sticky.  There's very little to tie your customer to you and they can very easily move.

3. I think to start a successful hosting biz these days you have to do some offline marketing, and I really have no desire to make sales calls.  Where the customers come from is an issue - unless you want to try to get your voice heard over the deafening din of the WHT offers section.

4. Fraud.  It's a hassle, and worse, I have no practical experience in handling it.

5. 2am pages.  Actually the 2am pages wouldn't bother me that much if I was making money.

6. I've never had any ideas which were true differentiators.  There's a million web hosts - what's truly different that I could offer?  I think that's my main stumbling block.

7. I'm sensitive to opportunity cost.  Putting 20 hours a week into an enterprise that makes $1000 a month is not a good deal.  4.3 weeks a month * 20 hours = 86 hours.  $1000 / 86 = $11.63/hour.  I could make more than that flipping burgers :)

I think #3, #6, and #7 are the major issues.  Where to get customers, how to be different, and how to make enough money that it's worth the effort.
 
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