Sane

Okay, for Christmas I got a new computer with 40 gigs. Now we have 6 computers for 5 people in one household. I figure I can put this computer to good use.

A high-speed professional business internet connection costs $80 CAN / month. Meaning I'd be able to have seperate bandwidth from my brothers, and bandwidth of 6 KBps (highspeed is 3 I believe).

But I don't want to buy this just for nothing. I figure if I can sell 1.9 gigabytes of web hosting to a maximum of 20 people for $5 CAN / month, I will be making all I need for the internet connection, plus some dessert.

But there are many combinations to consider. I could sell 1 gigabyte to 30 people for $3, 5 gigabytes to 7 people for $15...

Now I need your help to decide which combination would create the most revenue / month. As long as the space doesn't exceed 38 gigabytes and the money is no less then a guaranteed $80. Keeping in mind I'd be selling the space mainly over Ebay, and that target market would have to contain that many guaranteed members.

So whady'a think?


And if you have time for another question, this is more legal advice wanted. Am I able to advertise to make profit on a site which pertains information to a product not created by me? On http://jammersbase.ath.cx, it's a user-based score tracking system for a game called O2Jam. Could I be sued for putting advertisements or creating member privileges that cost money?

OpenLoop

I would go for the quick cash, 5 gigs for $15/mo. Also, less websites can mean less bandwidth usage (not always though).

Sane

What would be the cheapest out there for 5 gigs? Around $15?

And I just realised I could always do a combination of space/pay. But I must first get my standard rate ...

OpenLoop

I'm afraid not, it is hard to compete with big companies

jayme

You have to think about other things like will you be supplying first domain name free or will they have to pay for all their domain names? Or will you even have domain names, maybe you just decide to use sub-domains? You also have to try to make a good estimate of how many people you will get to buy hosting off you. Say you have 3 people come to you the first month, 2 people the next month, 4 people the 3rd month.. so now you have 9 people buying hosting off you for lets say 3 gigs for 10$. You will already have made $170 with only using up 27gigs after 3 months, which is good for a new company. Then you might have exceeded bandwidth limits, so that you can either cut them off for the rest of the month if they pass 5 gigs of bandwidth(or whatever you like), or they can pay $10 extra for however much extra bandwidth. These are just a few things to think about that should help a little bit.

__________________
▄▄▄▄

Download Code::Blocks now!
▄▄▄▄

Lich

hostingplex gives you 5gigs for $4 when you sign up for a year or 2, that's the cheapest I've sen. Web hosting is a very competitive business. Even if your prices are just as good,it's hard to offer something that people don't already have. Like a data center with security and nightly backups, a web control panel, etc. I don't even want to get into reseller web hosting because it's too much of a pain.

__________________
--John Cruz
Web Developer
www.cruzweb.net

Sane

Gah ... sounds pretty tough.

I guess I could always just use this: http://fileup.ath.cx:8080/ and then maybe elaborate, making money off the GoogleAds...

Dameon

Your server will not be prime real-estate when professional companies offer more for the same price. By more I mean the fact that you get a server/space on a server in a datacenter with guaranteed uptime, low latency from fewer hops, and a blazing fast connection.

What happens when your power goes out? When are you making backups of your customers' data? What operating system will you be running? Will you support PHP? How much database space are you going to allow? How do you plan to monitor and limit gB transfer/month? Are you going to put a cap on transfer/second to prevent flooding your connection?

Web hosting isn't a great idea for home.

__________________
MD5(sig) = bcef75433db02e9ad9bf81d6f7c5c270

Arevos

It's true that PHP/HTML hosting can be had a low price nowadays, but with your own server and gigabytes of space, maybe you should be thinking more upmarket, such as providing Virtual Private Servers (VPSs). A VPS splits a single server into several virtual servers, each with their own root. This gives users the advantage of having root access, without the cost of buying and hosting an entire server for themselves.

I've looked at VPSs before, and they seem to go for $15 p.m. up. Seems to me that you'd easily be able to undercut this, though what the demand for VPSs is I don't know.

Sane

I've also been thinking of creating my own things, like an exe they just run on their computer which gives them access to their PC from any location ... stuff like that. There are some obvious security flaws in that though. I'm still thinkin'...

But am I at least able to put GoogleAdSense on my JammersBase website?