I am starting a hosting "company" for clients in Africa and plan to charge $1/months for some basic hosting (sitting on top of a VPS). I am in Europe. Can this actually work, HN?
A second visit to this thread got me thinking and I got curious about your reasons for offering cheap hosting for Africa.<p>I could only think of 2 reasons, either you are trying to do some good or you just a guy on hustle trying to build something successful.<p>As a web/software developer from Africa who spends lots of time working on the next facebook, I pay my bills from the revenues from my web hosting business.<p>By offering hosting for $1 per month you'll end up leaving a good number of African tech hustlers broke. When you think about what you're doing, there is no big difference between you and Franc Lucas.<p>I don't mean to judge your intentions and I totally understand you trying to make a buck(its actually a cool idea and am sure it'd sell) but I thought it'd be nice for you to know the impact you'd have on Africa.<p>#SmartHustle
What kind of customer are you focusing on? Personal homepages, blogs, basic online presence for brick-and-mortar businesses, e-commerce sites, application hosting?<p>What level of access do your clients have? Web interface only, FTP, UNIX account with SSH, root on a Xen VM?<p>At the $1 level, transaction fees may eat up a large portion of your revenue. What is your plan to deal with the issue?<p>Are you planning to make a profit, break even, or will the service require financing indefinitely?<p>How will you make potential customers aware of your service?
Looks like you would be competing with nosupportlinuxhosting.com. If you are planning on offering a similar amount of support I can see it working. You might be able to save money on staffing by hiring locally (in Africa) if you can find the right skill sets.