Since hosting demands a lot of time to run, I wanted to know if the rewards and outcomes from hosting actually make the owners of small to medium size hosting businesses happy.
Running any business takes a lot of time and effort, running a hosting business can demand even more than most. Since it is an online business people are looking for help 24/7 and most companies also have customers in many countries, including out of their time zone.
If you run a business based in the US and had customers in Australia for example, you would need to have support available for customers during the day time in Aus.
This can require a lot of planning to get the times worked out right to have other people manning your support.
Many companies can't provide to pay other people for support, which means they need to give even more of their own time to providing support.

Apart from support, you also have to do everything the normal business owner would, like go over the accounts to make sure all bills are being paid, that your records are up to date and a lot of other things.

Aside from that, you also have the marketing and promotion to do..I could go on with a very long list of the number of things a hosting biz owner has to do to keep on top of the game.

Do you think many hosts are happy with what their business brings them? Not just in terms of money, but all rewards of running a business. Do you think it is worth the effort required?
If you are a host, does running a hosting business make you happy? Or would you be happier working in some other capacity?

Hey Stephen I think all of your questions are great ones. Every single one of them is what either makes or breaks a business.

I am very happy with my hosting business even if I don't see a new client for a month and investing back into the business puts me in the red for a bit, I am still happy, I know I am putting all I can into my business and so I know one day it will be as successful as I want it to be.

My focus is resellers and I can tell you they don't just get set up with a reseller account and left out on their own. They get hours of time from me just making them aware of all the responsibilites of being a host. The time it takes, the knowledge they will keep having to build on and the customer care and patience they will need. I probably spend more time than the average host prepping a reseller because I train them once they get the account on just about every aspect of hosting. I find it very rewarding though because I know that they are not going to get in and get too overwhelmed in the beginning.

I currently am a US based hosting business, but I am running the business from Europe and because of that I opted just recently to search for a company that could offer support when I am not able to as sleeping is still a requirement for humans. I am online about 16 hours a say though and so this company now has freed up some time for me so that I can focus on advertising and the reseller training as well as some time to build on my skills. I didn't mind trying to do it all by myself but there comes a time when you can't and I really feared I would wake up to a server that had been down for 6 hours while I was asleep so this also helps that.

You wll find as the business grows that different aspects of it make you happy, for example in the beginning I was happy just to even start a hosting business. Then after a while I was excited about taking it public. Then I was happy that I could solve many of the problems on my own or was smart enough to get help for what I didn't know.

But the happiest days are when a customer says thank you! Those are my happiest days otherwise I am just happy!

Maybe that is why some hosting business aren't around after a couple months, they get into it and find it wasn't what they thought or too much time was needed that they couldn't give and so they get out.

No job or business will make you happy all the time but I can say this business makes me happy 99% of the time.

I enjoy hosting, I find it really fun actually, whether or not I make money isnt too much of a deal as long as im not losing a whole lot..

It's one of those thankless tasks at times, but when we get the e-mail saying thanks and it was appreciated when we recover someones DB of fix a coding problem that is outside our normal support we get a warm fuzzy glow

Good question.
To be totally honest, I think hosting is one of the harder businesses to run, mainly because of the competition with so many hosts offering large plans for very low prices. A lot of people go to them, but some of those people may be the customers you don’t want, ones that will just move on if they find a better deal.

I think hosting support is ok, you can have about 3-4 people doing support that would end up providing 24/7 support, although it is getting very cheap to outsource your support to another company.

The administration side to a hosting business needs just as much work as any business, although with having an online business, everything may already be semi-automated and a lot easier to manage. Most scripts used now have reports available that really help with billing, doing accounts and other important things.

Marketing and promotion doesn’t take too much time, searching around for some places to advertise can take a while, if you stay with the one place for a while, you can normally get a good deal and money off advertising. If you advertise on a community I think it works even better. There are then returning visitors that become used to your ad and they normally also help promote your business by suggesting it – To do with branding.
I don’t do too much marketing or promotion at the minute though to be honest.

When I did free hosting I was a lot happier with the rewards of hosting, people were happy and it made me happy being able to help them with hosting their sites free and when I could help them with a problem.

I think when a hosting company is small, it isn’t worth the effort as much as a large company, the reason being a lot of work is required getting a hosting company started off, I would say a lot more work is needed when you are smaller than when you grow.
When you grow, you can bring on more people to do support, plus you don’t have the hassle of setting up a load of scripts, your own accounts with CC processors and other things that you need.

I don’t think I would rather work in some other industry, maybe something away from computers but I do a volunteer job doing care work and I really like that.

I would love to be able to run sites for a living, but there just isn’t enough money in that and they can have big startup costs depending on what you are wanting to do.

Running sites also need a lot of work but I find it very rewarding when I have happy members and a happy community overall

Hosting makes me smile
Very very happy doing what I do.

Hosting works for me. I get to combine tech writing, teaching, and systems / information management.

I started out with the intent to farm some things out: accounting, for example. I do the day-to-day maintenance, but meet with an accountant every three months to go over things. (Brief meetings, usually - especially as I got better at recordkeeping. But the accountant knows all the deductions that can be taken. I leave that to them - they're the experts in that area.)

I head up support and general customer service, but have others who assist.

I do not head up sales. My marketing techniques are best described as "crude" I do press releases, page optimization, site SEO, and thus; but have another person who handles long-range marketing planning and such.

I handle some server maintenance, but I will always be the "backup" person in that regard. I can do it, but it doesn't give me the same thrill (yeah...we're all a bit sick here) as does planning and writing the documentation.

I do keep records up to date, and handle A/P and A/R.

There are some minor bits here and there that I don't love...but there's always going to be something non-delightful.