Joshua, welcome to the forum and I can see you're educated enough to run your small business successfully.

I don't run a hosting company myself, so I'll leave the part about mentorship to other members. As for how to start your business, I'm sure that if you are really serious about it, every person would advice you to go see a lawyer to have some idea of how much liability and financing it would require from your side to officially run business.

What many people also advice is to hang around specialized forums such as this one and learn more about the industry's strength and weaknesses, opportunities and threats to realize how you can focus yourself on creating value on an already saturated market.

From my personal viewpoint, I see web hosting business as a very unattractive market to compete it due to low entry barriers (everyone wants to get in nowadays), high power of buyers and threat of substiture products (once something wrong goes in your company - you may lose clients you fought for in the first place because the switching cost for them is very low), high administrative costs and plenty of time.

But there still are a few companies that started small and are now big, but most of them started 7-10 years ago and were just in time to get on the action. Right now I see the industry is in a mature stage as it does not generate high returns - only average or above average, if managed correctly.

So my advice, stick to hosting forums, learn more, write a business plan, including projected financials for at least 1-2 years ahead. Make sure you have enough funds at all times to keep your business running for at least 6-8 upcoming months.

Hope this helps a bit.

Best,