Web Hosting Experience
A search of the web leads to mostly reselling web hosting services. I am not talking about paying a monthly fee to a company in order to resell their services, where they handle everything for you, including the support. I'm talking about being a web host, in control of everything. I created a platform that offers Managed WordPress Hosting specialized for web developers in mind.
From trying to understand how many cores, memory, bandwidth, and hard disk space I actually need on my dedicated server to knowing how many websites this platform can actually handle. If you've ever truly done web hosting -- not reselling services -- but actually launching the dedicated server and installing CPanel, WHMCS, VestaCP, or your own custom platform, what has been your experience? Are you still in it? Did you leave it and if so, why? What should I expect?
My day job is in the hosting industry, but you don't have to be an insider to see that this is an incredibly cutthroat business. The big players operate at huge scale and have very sophisticated marketing operations, and still aren't able to charge very much. You have to sell a LOT of 2.99/month hosting plans to make a relevant amount of money and cover your costs. cPanel/VPS/dedicated servers seem to be at effectively commodity pricing already, owing to intense competition.
Things seem slightly better in the "Managed Wordpress"-type space (WP Engine & friends), but still it seems like margins are getting tighter: GoDaddy is offering a managed WP product for $3.99/month.
The only real way I would thing about building a business around this is as an adjunct to some kind of agency or consulting model ("I'll build your site for $x and host it for $y/month if you don't want to bother.").
Without massive scale, I don't see a realistic way to compete in this business.
Thank you Cameron for letting me know about the business.
While I'm not seeking to be the competition, I always seek to be an alternative and have added features to streamline a lot of a WordPress web developer's processes.
When I first started building it... I almost wanted to stop, thinking, "Wow, who is going to want to use this?" But then I realized the things I could build into it, mostly all one-click features. And I suppose other companies have those too, but I've also read negative reviews about those companies, so there will always be people looking for alternatives to something.
The other thing you might look at, if you have the relevant kind of experience, is a scaling story for Wordpress. Currently, there really isn't one, beyond building something custom.
I think the first person who can honestly say "we'll host your Wordpress site, and it will stay up, even if it goes from totally dead to thousands of signups and comments per minute if, e.g. you end up on the front page of reddit.
Current solutions to this problem are basically CloudFlare or other caching-based solutions, but something that uses some kind of Galera-backed, Lambda-fronted (just spitballing on the actual technologies) to be able to really scale up, even for non-passive visitors, might be able to compete on product.
Even then though, you probably can't compete on customer acquisition. I don't see how a lone hacker can realistically survive the CACs (in terms of affiliate fees or keyword dates) that places like WP Engine are likely paying right now. Some of these affiliate programs (you can sign up as an affiliate to snipe their rates) are paying like 20x monthly revenue for a signup. That maybe makes sense at scale, when you are well-capitalized, but seems like suicide for a one-man shop -- you would have to survive 20 cashflow-negative months before you get ahead at those rates. The amount of capital you'd need to set up a sustainable business with those rates is enough that you could just put it in a CD and live quite well off the interest.
WP Engine is crazy for doing that, but probably has felt it has been worth the risk. Not quite something I can offer, but I've been testing load the server can take... didn't even phase it at 10,000 visitors all visiting in a minute. Might have to upgrade my plan so I can try and break it beyond that. But you're right on any edge to sell.
I've got a user-friendly design, a blog, and help in a few words to give my users direction. Not too hard to figure it out, like anything, there's a few minutes learning curb and that's usually all it takes. Thanks for your advice. I do feel like I should start out with a niche target rather than sending it off into the wild and hoping for the best.