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Buy 50 servers and start leasing VPS for $19 a month. 1000 clients will leave 20k a month enough to pay a sysadmin and pocket some cash while you monitor every

• imp 17y ago
  I don't think shared hosting has the "home-run" type upside that he's looking for.
  • lsc 17y ago
    the difference between a 'vps' and 'the cloud' is little more than an API layer. Many people seem to think there is much upside in the cloud. (that said, I'm not saying you are wrong; owning infrastructure and renting it out usually has a reasonable and predictable (and not huge) upside.)
• lsc 17y ago
  I'm not saying it's a bad idea; If you don't count marketing costs, there is lots of margin in the VPS business right now. However, it's probably a bad idea if you aren't a SysAdmin. At least until you get those 1000 customers, it will be difficult to buy your hardware /and/ retain a good enough sysadmin. also, you are probably better off with dual-socket servers w/ at least 32GiB ram, which will cost you considerably more than a grand each, but that will likely get you more power/ram for your money. For a grand a pop, you are probably looking at 8G ram servers, so if you are trying to put 1000 customers on those puppies, you are going to be coming in at around twice what I charge, and pretty close to what Linode charges. Linode is very good and very established, and they have an excellent toolset. You will need to spend a lot of marketing dollars to say "Hey you've never heard of me, but pay me just as much as you'd pay the established player with the good reputation" If you still really want to do it, go buy my book[1] - I've included much of what I learned running my own VPS company. [1] http://nostarch.com/xen.htm http://nostarch.com/xen.htm