I currently run a free hosting business and I'm running on a reseller account which is terrible because I'm so much of a power hog. I love to tweak things to my likening. Well at the rate I’m going, I expect to be getting a dedicated server around Feb of next year. My budget is around $300 or less per month, but I'm open to any suggestions that is within reason.

I liked the unmetered bandwidth packages because I could offer more bandwidth to my users, but I noticed that the CPUs weren’t as good. I want to be able to support both Paid and free hosting on the same server for now, until I can grow my business outward and get more servers. I didn't think a single CPU would benefit hosting both Paid and free customers as the Paid customers may get a little mad if the CPU is running high some of the time, but that is just what I thought would happen. I would like to maximize the space on the server so that I can offer little bit bigger upgrades to my current plans. But starting off with something smaller is fine, as long as I can upgrade to new drives later on.

I’m wondering if anyone has any experiences they would like to add about my situation. What kind of server would I want to get and what kind of specs would I look for. Would some kind of load balancing system work great for the paid and free server that I would get?


Thanks For All The Help,
Ryan

I would think that with about $300/mth budget, it might be a good idea to probably get two machines. One with the lowest end unmetered bandwidth server for the free hosting clients and another higher end metered server for the paying customers.

This way, you be able to control to some extend the budget spend on the free hosting and well since it is free I am sure they would be accustomed to performance. Frankly I wouldn't treat them as high a priority as the paying customers. Remember the unmetered plans are pure cogent lines without any multi-peering apart from what cogent provides.

The paying customers should be able to get some value-added benefits such as multi-piped bandwidth through the standard Servermatrix server plans and better hardware with less sharing as compared to the free hosting clients. This would give those doing the free hosting something to upgrade to.

No point putting the free and paid customers on the same machine and same network because then there is no real incentive to pay.

And the trouble with free customers is that there are chances of one bad hats once in a while which might cause problems and you sure do not want your paying customers to suffer from any such problems. Not to say that all are bad.

You do not need to do load balancing. Treat the free and paid customers as separate entities.

I had thought about doing that, but the price range is a little out of the way. It would be almost $500.00 for a server setup like that. Currently I dont have any paid users, so that plan wouldn't work well. If I were to get that plan, I would need to get paid users ASAP or I would have to find some way to pay the bill.

I think I will have to go with one of the unmetered bandwith plans because I dont know if the CPUs would be good enough to handle the load. If I were to get more paid users, I would look into getting a better server for them.

I could always just get a cognet line for $1000.00 and run my own datacenter.


Ryan

Personality, I think you shouldn't worry about overloading the free hosting sites since I believe your main idea of having free and paid hosting is to upsell your free hosting clients to the paid one and not the other way around.

As for the set up fees, they are only one time but of cause they have various level of setup fees you can select based on what you are comfortable with. You could always opt for the lowest $0 setup fees for now, pay the higher monthly but when you make money, you can upgrade the setup fees and lower the monthly fees. The setup fees need not be paid entirely at initial setup.

A cogent line for hosting is more like $3000 for the pipe without counting the rest of the nitty gitties.

I was going for the lowest month to month cost, with the higher setup fee. I never really considered getting the $0 setup and upgrading to a new level later. I think by Feb, I should have more then enough to cover any setup fees that would exist. I wil continue to look at other options, I just wanted to see what other thought and if they had any suggestions.

I thought congnet offered $10 per port per megabit. So for $1000 /month, you would get 100 Mbps. Did I miss something?


Ryan

I don't want to shatter your dreams but I agree with Eddy, if you put your paid users on the same machine as the free ones, you are asking for trouble.

If you can't afford to run the server don't move to dedicated, it really is as simple as that. For a genuine statrtup company you need to be able to cover the costs for many months without a payment coming in, if you put the server online and expect payments within a month or so, you are looking at failure straight away.

Look at this from the worst case scenario. What happens if you don't get any upgrades within the first few months. Even worse, what happens if you get a few upgrades and can't cover the cost of the server? If they are all free accounts, you have nothing to worry about, but even if you have 1 paid account you need to make sure that server is online and serving requests.

I could afford one server, not two servers at the present time. I have had a stable few months and I'm waiting a couple months into the New Year so I can make sure that I will make it. If anything looks out of place, I will just delay it a month or two.

The issue that I'm stuck on is that fact that I have just started to work on getting my paid plans out there. I have a hand full of users that plan on upgrading, but its noting concrete. A month or so back I switched resellers because my other one was too unreliable. I didn’t want to offer paid users on that server because I didn’t want it to reflect my image and I don’t want to provide a piece of crap server for the free users either. I do believe that the paid users should come first and should get the better server. I think if the server is crap on the free one, they might think twice if they wanted to upgrade to one of my paid plans. I know that I do not want to spend a lot of money on the free server because essentially they are not as important, but I do need them to stay or I would loose money. I would like to have the option of expanding my services to my users, things like image hosting, blog hosting, web hosting and more. I don’t feel that a overloaded server would reflect very well on to my business.

The main reason I would not get the two servers is mainly because I don’t have any paid users currently and I wouldn’t see myself getting a bunch when I first really offer it. If I were to get the two servers, I would be able to support one server, but I would almost have to rush and get customers to fill the paid server. I don’t want to back my self into a corner here and not be left with very many options because I didn't hit my break-even point on my paid server.

One idea that I came up with would be do get the medium or high end unmetered bandwidth server. I could put my free users on their and have all my free stuff there. I could run my paid users off my reseller account until I can get enough money to get a regular server. I don’t know how well of an idea that would be.


I appreciate all the comments.

Ryan