Solution for Selling Web Hosting
From Ubiquity Server Wiki
Ubiquity's services are used by a number of successful companies to sell web hosting services. Over time, we have developed a complete solution that follows - fully detailing what we believe is the best way to succeed as a web hosting company - allowing us to work with you with the most mutual success.
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Foundations of your Web Hosting Company
Before you get started selling web hosting, you will need to make some decisions about the underlying software. Through years of experience in this industry and seeing what options work and don't work for our customers - we strongly recommend looking at each of the following before you get started.
Billing / Support / Automation
You will need a billing system to sell web hosting. Many options will work, however Ubiquity recommends WHMCS as the solution for this. This costs roughly $20/month, and has fantastic support backing it. This will act as your billing center, signup system, account creation system, affiliate referral system, customer support center, and registrar / domain management system all rolled into one piece of software. Certain features - such as automation with web hosting control panels and registrar API features in the client control panel - we believe you'll find are far more advanced than all other options currently on the market. We strongly recommend also employing a fraud mitigation system as well - such as MaxMind - which plugs right into WHMCS and only costs a few pennies per transaction. This tool generally saves most web hosting start-ups hundreds if not thousands in lost revenue right away from charge-backs by looking at the legitimacy of the request, and even going so far as calling your customer to verify the order if you would like it to do so. Ubiquity can install, configure, and deploy this application for you, for a $100 per hour.
Payment Gateways
There are basically two methods of accepting payments. You can register for a free PayPal Business account on PayPal.com, or register for a merchant account with a company such as CDG Commerce to accept credit card payments directly - who allows you to use their Quantum gateway for free if you do (meaning no payment gateway fees - which competing services like authorize.net that you would otherwise need would cost you). Both of these systems of accepting payments work very easily through modules already built into WHMCS.
Domain Registrations
In order to sell web hosting, you will likely want the ability to register domain names for your clients. There are a handful of ICANN-accredited registrars with fantastic reseller API's - that will work directly with major web hosting billing systems. Ubiquity recommends using Enom's domain reseller system for this, plugged directly into the WHMCS API.
Recommended Ubiquity Server Solution
The server configurations below are Ubiquity's recommended options for selling web hosting services. A lot of companies don't say this - but it's not necessary to get in over your head early on. A lot of web hosting companies go under because they don't manage things well at the onset - and that's not in anyone's best interest. If it's within your budget however, the recommended full scale options at the bottom are what we feel the ideal server solution to be for once you really get off the ground and want your operations to be efficient.
For Selling Linux Hosting (starter)
Data Center: First Available Plan: Myriad VPS Control Panel: cPanel+WHM with Fantastico OS: CentOS 5.2 Management: Fully Managed (Why get a fully managed server) NAS Backup: 10GB Monthly Rate: $59.95
For Selling Windows Hosting (starter)
Data Center: First Available Plan: Myriad VPS Control Panel: Plesk 8 with Installatron OS: Windows 2003 Standard Edition Management: Fully Managed (Why get a fully managed server) NAS Backup: 10GB Monthly Rate: $104.95
Once your company reaches full scale, we've found that a setup similar to the following tends to be the most effective, efficient, and profitable.
For Selling Linux Hosting (full scale)
Data Center: First Available Processor: Dual Xeon E5520 (quad-core) Memory: 12,288 MB DDR3 RAM Hard Disk: 2x 500GB SATAII Hard Disk, RAID I (drive mirroring) Control Panel: cPanel+WHM with Fantastico OS: CentOS 5.4 x64 Management: Fully Managed (Why get a fully managed server) Bandwidth: 6000GB Data Transfer Port Speed: 100Mbit NAS Backup: 50GB Monthly Rate: $534.00
For Selling Windows Hosting (full scale)
Data Center: First Available Processor: Dual Xeon E5520(quad-core) Memory: 12288 MB ECC-Registered RAM Hard Disk: 2x 500GB SATAII Hard Disk, RAID I (drive mirroring) Control Panel: Plesk 8 Unlimited Domain with Installatron OS: Windows 2008 Web Edition Management: Fully Managed (Why get a fully managed server) Bandwidth: 6000GB Data Transfer Port Speed: 100Mbit NAS Backup: 50GB Monthly Rate: $604.00
Business Plan
Generally speaking, the number of domain names you can host on a server is completely relative to what kid of system resources those websites use. With the right type of website, a server could host 100,000 websites, or it could host 1/100,000th of a website. It depends entirely on how much traffic and what type of strain their code puts on the system. With that said, generally speaking, a Dual Xeon server like the system mentioned above can typically support a conservative 450 web hosting accounts responsibly. This is, for the most part, without prejudice to disk/bandwidth allocations - as it is almost always the strain on CPU and memory that causes a web hosting server to reach it's capacity. You will know when the system is nearing capacity when the server's load average - showing how hard the system is being worked - begins to near it's recommended level (generally 1.0 for as many processors are on the system - or 8.0 in the example above).
Therefore, if for example you charge your customers an average of $7/month in your web hosting offerings, the following represents a hypothetical business plan.
Revenue 450 Accounts x $7 = $3150/month in gross revenue Expenses $20/month for a WHMCS License $534/month for a fully managed dedicated server $79/month for ~2.5% PayPal/Merchant processing fees $633/month in total expenses Net Profit $3150-$663 = $2487.00/month net profit per occupied server
How to Make your Services Truly Private-Label
It's easy to remove nearly all traces of Ubiquity Server Solutions and the control panel vendor from your services, creating the feel of a complex and completely in-house developed operation.
Branding
This can be adjusted by uploading custom branding to your cPanel or Plesk server via the administration panel. Your WHMCS client management can also be customized via the SMARTY template system.
Custom DNS Servers
You can easily set up Custom DNS Servers on your managed servers with Ubiquity, using your company domain name.
Network and Whois
Ubiquity IP ranges are associated with the Nobis Technology Group rather than Ubiquity - making them as ambiguous as is technically possible by themselves from the on-set. Reverse DNS entries can be set to show your company name in both VPS and dedicated servers (see Modifying the Reverse DNS Configuration of an IP) and dedicated server clients can even place their own whois contacts on their IP ranges using SWIP (see Requesting your name be placed on an IP whois report (SWIP)). Domain names registered via an Enom reseller account will also show your company information as the authorized registrant.
