As others have mentioned, hosting is not a profitable business in itself. There are plenty of web/vps/dedicated hosting services who have been in the business f

As others have mentioned, hosting is not a profitable business in itself. There are plenty of web/vps/dedicated hosting services who have been in the business for years and who can easily outcompete you on price, features, stability, and pretty much every other metric that you can come up with. Except one thing. DreamHost staff are generalists. They're probably good at fixing hacked WordPress blogs, but they will never be able to compete with you when it comes to in-depth troubleshooting of the exact application that you built for your client. At best, all they can do is direct your client back to you. At worst, they'll misdiagnose the problem and damage your client's website. You, on the other hand, are a specialist. You know the website inside and out. You can take one look at an error message and figure out exactly which line of which file is causing the issue. You know when the software stack will need to be upgraded, and you know which parts are the most likely to cause trouble after an upgrade. You know when the client is expecting traffic spikes, and you know that when that happens, DreamHost is likely to suspend your client's website. Your hosting package, should you choose to offer one, must take advantage of these differences. It should be part of a long-term support contract, not a standalone product, and it should be massively overpriced, like, at least an order of magnitude more expensive than the off-the-shelf equivalent. In exchange, the client gets a server stack that is perfectly tailored to their app (nginx, node.js, redis, you name it), a guarantee that they will never receive a canned answer in response to an urgent support request, and a guarantee that their website will not be suspended in the middle of the biggest marketing campaign of the year. And of course you should be ready to fulfill such expectations. Don't use cheap servers to host your clients, get some Linodes or Droplets instead. There will be no in-house email hosting, it should be outsourced to Google Apps or some other company that specializes in email. Don't mess with cPanel, your clients can call you if they need to make any changes. Everything should be premium-grade, because there's no money to be made in the low-end market. Make your customer feel like your offer is actually worth the combined cost of hosting and support that you're charging them for.