The Secrets Behind Starting a Web Hosting Company will give you an idea of what you need to know in order to start and be successful. Probably there are hundreds of Web Hosting Companies around the world and every single one has its own history of success and mistakes to tell.

History

It was around 1994 when GeoCities was launched and at that time they allowed users to create and publish their own web pages for free. At the same time they create a search index of the pages they were hosting that allows people to search content in their own systems based on interest. Not only the concept of Web Hosting was created but the Search Engine that we know are at the beginning of their invention.

Nowadays there are hundreds of web hosting and all of them have similitude and differences. We are not talking here about the monster cloud companies that own the biggest data centers in the world like Google, Azure, Oracle, or Amazon just to mention some of them. These are totally different classifications of services that happen to have the possibility of hosting websites.

I want to refer to hosting companies as those that offer exclusive products for hosting websites and the products related to creating, designing, maintaining, and securing these sites. Some of these companies use the monsters mentioned in the paragraph before to host and offer to customers a more simplified version of that infrastructure.

The similitude includes the type of products their all offers, and private space with public access. The difference is basically prices, quality of services, the Service-Level Agreement, and the technology they use for implementing those products, like operating systems, software, licensing, and so on.

Let's start with the biggest of The Secrets Behind Starting a Web Hosting Company:

1.- Billing System and Hosting Management: The center point of every single hosting company is the automatization platform that will automate their business. This will allow the registration of customers, the billing of the products, and the deployment of the services that have been acquired between others.

There are a few of these in the market and you need to review them and select the one you think would be the best and more suitable for you. Just to mention some of them: Whmcs, Blesta, Clientexec, and Hostbill. These are all good choices.

They all offer addons or plugins and integrations for the automatization of the hosting process. I will pick up as an example the Whmcs which is the one that neteron.com uses and it is probably the most used Billing System and Hosting Management for the web hosting companies around the world. Remember that they all offer similar advantages so the next points will refer not explosively to the Whmcs:

It manages the process of creating and terminating the account and automates the entire customer life cycle for web hosting.
The native support for the deployment of web accounts using the most important Web Control Panels on the market, like cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, Interworx, Virtualmin, and others.
It also has native integration for domain reselling through eNoms, OpenSRS, and many more. You will be able to resell hundreds and hundreds of domain extensions through any of them.
Whmcs has the power of managing the recurring invoicing and payments, it has native integration to a very long list of payment gateway providers like Authorize, Stripe, PayPal, Skrill, eWay, CheckOut, etc. The list is really long.
It has out-of-the-box integration to a marketplace where you can sell and deploy security products like SSL, CDNs, Spam Protection, Marware Scanning, backups, and more.
Also, it offers the possibility to deploy dedicated servers in some data centers and/or virtual private machines, allowing the end customers to manage their product through an inside management console.
And for the last but not less important, it offers integration for messaging products, like Slack and Hipchat; the possibility to have your own licensing software that allowed you to sell and distribute your own PHP code securely.

All the billing and automatization software has similar products to offer, take a look at the links for more information about them.

Second of The Secrets Behind Starting a Web Hosting Company:

Most web hosting companies do not have ICCAN Accreditation or any other accreditation for selling or registering domain names. We are resellers of those who have the accreditation and we are legally bound and tied to their policies as we are affiliated with their reseller programs.

The reason why we are not accredited for the ICAAN is the money and the technicality. First, the license has a very high cost per year and you would need to sell hundreds of names per day to get some profits; for the second, the technicality, you would need to build and maintain a very complicated interface for connecting every single domain manager to your billing system.

Imagine that there are hundreds of domain extensions and not all the extensions are administered by the same entity. This means that the requirements changes between them, same as how they manage the connection to their interfaces. You would need a team of people to be able to build and maintain such complexity.

The same would be true for you if you start your own hosting company. You would need to pick up the domain reseller that you considered the best for you.

Neteron is an affiliated reseller of eNoms and RProxy. Also, as neteron.com is a Finish company, we built and manage our own interface for reselling directly the ".fi" domain. We are registered and accredited by Traficom for such a purpose under our main company name Vanaja Commerce and Solutions.

Third of The Secrets Behind Starting a Web Hosting Company:

Your Web Hosting Control panel would be another step for consideration. You must pick up the one you think is the most appropriate for you and your customers. It provides a graphical interface and automation tools designed to simplify the process of hosting a website for the website owner or the "end-user". It enables administration through a standard web browser using an easy-to-use structure.

You would be able to manage the server that will host your customers, and your customers will be able to manage their own hosting accounts. These happened through two different interfaces, one for the server administration and the other for the end-user.

cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, Interworx, CWP, Webuzo and Cyberpanel are all well know in the industry.

There is an Easy Way revealed in this Forth of The Secrets Behind Starting a Web Hosting Company:

Neteron.com and other web hosting companies offer different reseller programs specifically designed for starting a web hosting company. You will be able to start your company using all the products they have in listing and in a white-label model. This would be the easiest and cheapest way to start your company and I would personally recommend for starters to try first this way.

You don't need to invest big money in anything and you will have the total support for all the products that are available for reselling. Starting in this way will give you the time to master all the information and technology surrounding the web hosting industry before you consider flying solo.

The End.