Have a few questions I was curious about but have not seen asked on other forums. I was just curious about others experiences when they first started in the web hosting business.

1) How long after starting your hosting company did it take to get your first customer?

2) How did you go about getting your first customer?

3) If it took awhile to get that first customer, did you get discouraged and ask yourself if the hosting business was a wise choice or not?

Just a few questions I thought I would ask of those who have been in the business. There may be others like myself who are just starting out and would like to know also others first experiences when they started out.

1) How long after starting your hosting company did it take to get your first customer?

I had a couple of clients before i started officially, but it was only a couple of weeks before i got my first offical client

2) How did you go about getting your first customer?

i think the best start is using ebay, but dont make your plans too cheap looking. also get a good professioanl looking website

3) If it took awhile to get that first customer, did you get discouraged and ask yourself if the hosting business was a wise choice or not?

I was never discouraged, i started small on a reseller account then a master reseller and now i have 3 VPS servers.

Your questions don't actually just apply to resellers.. It applies to every host.

Not too long after my first advertisement.

I posted an ad on forums.

I expected a slow beginning beforehand so it wasn't much of a discouragement.

It would be desirable to start a hosting company with some previous hosting experience may be in terms of reseller hosting or affiliates programmes.
Else if you are already in internet business like web designer, development or SEO you can easily convert the existing customer into hosting customer.
Apart from this, it is not advisable to start web hosting company without any prior experience

this i totally agree with, but the fact is that you get those who see on ebay reseller hosting $3 for 5 yrs which they will purchase and then call themselves web hosts. and then when the host selling plans $3 for 5 yrs suddently vanishes they will come on these forums looking for solutions to why they can no longer acces their hosting.

so best thing find a decent long established host with a track record that offers a substainable rate for hosting and then get a good clioentbase built up before your update your hosting.

Starting any business is going to be difficult, if it were easy, everyone would be a successful business owner. When I first started my company (FernGullyGraphics), I had already been working with a pretty big web hosting company at the time (which I will not name) for about 2 years. So I already had a pretty good idea of what it took (at least to get started).

I think before you go any further in your web hosting venture, I think you need to ask your-self why you started your business in the first place?

How long after starting your hosting company did it take to get your first customer?

It took 1 month to get our first customer and that too paid monthly 1$ for a plan and you know dedicated servers are really expensive...


How did you go about getting your first customer?

Offline and online both. We are just 3 and a half month old company and we do little optimization, posting article on different topics, following forum and blogs and etc. To make some market here in India we Neutralized web development company to use our shared hosting environment and get direct 30 - 40% discount.

If it took awhile to get that first customer, did you get discouraged and ask yourself if the hosting business was a wise choice or not?

Well when you do any business you don't get success at once. Everyone get a thought in mind whether his efforts are useful or not...

this is only too true, my other business is selling toys at summer shows and country shows. 95% of these are in farm fields, normally you get good crowds when the sun is out it is great, but when you get their at 6am in the morning and the field is muddy after a night of rain and you spend an hour setting up and then it starts to rain and you get a trickle of people all day and you evenually pack up at 5pm and then an hrs travel to get back home, you then wonder why the hell am i doing this

willowhost: I havent started my Hosting company till now
If you want, you can start lol

Now, to be on serious note.
You can start and then need to post reviews on some forums, blogs etc and do good marketing in order to get good loyal customers

And never stop promoting

you will then find what months are quite then you can increase your promoting to them months.

in 11 years we have found Jan/Feb are almost dead months in relation to new clients, so we dont spend as much promoting in these months as it is a waste of money, but others may find that these months are good months

As an affiliate of hosts (not a host myself) I have found December to be generally a bad month, and January and February to be good months. I imagine things may depend a lot on the type of customer and the sources of website traffic.

see thats a prime example Dec. is our best month. the month we write off totally is June as the last 3 yrs not 1 sale in June (hosting)

Hi there,

It was in 2000 and I do not remember how long it had taken. However I remember that we had a lot of customer on Reseller account already and needed a good Dedicated hosting. All customer we got then came from online sources.

1) How long after starting your hosting company did it take to get your first customer?

Hard work it will take less than 1 week

2) How did you go about getting your first customer?

Getting from google

3) If it took awhile to get that first customer, did you get discouraged and ask yourself if the hosting business was a wise choice or not?

not at all, because to succeed in life we must be patient and work harder. not easy to succeed if there is no patience and hard work