Setting up my own hosting network.

Web hosting is among the most saturated and difficult markets to compete
in. I did it for four years, and busted my butt trying to make it work. I had
six co-located servers and two dedicated servers and kept them pretty busy.

But the problems with managing your own servers are many indeed. First,
servers get angry, they get cantankerous. Sometimes they seem to have
minds of their own, and when they crash, stall, break, or get
misconfigured, you really need to know how to fix all of that - which is
significantly more difficult (and/or expensive) from a remote location.

Everything that hosting is, free hosting is, as well, but worse. You need a
mountain of anti-spammer controls and measures, and even part of your
daily regimen will be the removal of those who abuse the free side of the
service. I wouldn't even try free hosting at all.

There are resellers out there who do well, but the ones I've known who do
well mostly sell space to people for whom they also do design work. Other
than that, without a great deal of starting resources, especially for
advertising, it is very difficult to get a fledgling hosting company off the ground.

You cannot compete on price. It's the dumbest thing that new web hosts
do, as though cheap somehow equates to value. You can't compete on
service because companies like Bluehost and Hostgator, with whom a
majority of Warriors host, provide outstanding service, from full service
departments.

You could come up with some stylistic reason, like "the world's shiniest
webhost" and then make all sorts of comedic references as to why it
matters that your potential customers use a shiny webhost. Something like
that might draw you a certain crowd. But I wouldn't even hazard a guess
as to how well it would do.

Take it from me, hosting is nightmare if you're a one man operation. I did
hire several support agents, and remote techs after a while, but it was just
too difficult for us to manage once we topped a certain number of clients.
There were never enough hours in the day to manage the support issues,
and the budget just wouldn't support growing the company with clientele
and simultaneously allow us to add enough staff to support them.

I was eventually faced with the option of taking out a pretty huge loan to
grow the company proper, but opted instead to sell the company to a
bigger web host which was able to offer better service to my clients.

I hope I don't sound like a naysayer, I'm just giving you my personal
experience. You'll probably find a lot of successful people at the forum
mentioned above. But be careful though. There are a lot of highly
defensive geek-types there who frown on the inexperienced who jump in
with dollar signs in their eyes.

It's not a business for everyone.

Good luck.