Create a Business Plan

You only have to look at the continued growth of major web hosting companies to see what a lucrative industry it can be. With the likes of GoDaddy making their presence felt at the Superbowl and many of their competitors drawing in the kind of eye-watering turnovers usually reserved for epic multi-nationals, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there’s money to be made by starting up a web hosting company.

The only big problem, of course, is that most of us lack either the budget, the resources, the technical resources, or all of the above to adequately set about investing in huge physical servers and setting out to make our mark on the Internet.

Of course, that’s only a problem if you let it be. The good news is that we don’t need any of those things to start a reseller hosting company. With a dedicated server rented from an existing provider at an affordable price, a bit of forethought and a lot of research, pretty much anybody can get into the web hosting industry.

Yet before you go marching in and snapping up your first cheap dedicated server you come across, it pays to take a step back, grab a pen and a few sheets of paper, and set about the task of creating a business plan. Sure, it may not be the most fun aspect of starting your new online enterprise, but it will certainly be worth it in the long run.

Why create a business plan before buying your dedicated server?

If you already know even the slightest bit about business, the fact that you need a business plan may not come as much of a surprise.

Whether you’re selling hosting or hosiery, technology or tequila bottles, you’ll find the entire process much easier with a business plan. Here’s just a few ways that creating a business plan for your reseller hosting company will come in handy:

  • Helping you identify the challenges which lay ahead and coming up with strategies for dealing with them
  • Helping you identify what could go wrong and how to plan accordingly
  • Defining a clear purpose and mission for your business
  • Outlining clear goals that will help you in the long run to understand how successful your new business is.

So, that’s the why taken care of, but what about the what and the how? What exactly should you put into your business plan, and how should you go about it? Here’s a few pointers.

Research your market

Your business plan should also demonstrate that you really know the market you’re getting into. You don’t have to understand how every last component of a dedicated server works, but at the very least you should have a good knowledge of the industry you’re getting yourself into. After all, as a customer, would you want to work with a company who don’t know their own industry?

Get to know your audience

As part of this research you’ll be looking for a gap in the market, for an audience that isn’t currently being catered for by existing companies, and coming up with ideas about how your business can cater for them.

Understand the competition

Remember, competition is fierce out there. More and more web hosting companies are cropping up regularly, all looking for their own piece of the proverbial pie, so if you’re to ensure that customers flock to you rather than those competitors, you need to do something different.

Use dedicated server review sites and comparison charts to look at what the top hosting companies are doing, then dig a little deeper to check out those smaller, niche sites. You’ll soon know what works and how you can do it better.