Ask HN: Is the reseller hosting market worth touching?

Realize that you can't compete on price. There are thousands of bargain hosting companies that spring up every day offering $3-$10 hosting and unlimited storage/bandwidth/domains. Of course, many of these go out of business, or kick out customers who actually get a fair amount of traffic. You have to approach from a different angle.<p>Look at wpengine.com. They are targeting the WordPress blogger who has outgrown shared hosting but doesn't want to get into the server admin business. For $50/month, they handle caching, scaling, database replication, backups, CDN, and staging.<p>Your best bet would be to offer better service and scalability at a higher price point. There is a big market out there for site owners who are in between shared hosting and running their own server. Just because I get 100,000-300,000 unique visitors a month doesn't mean I know my way around a Unix command line. That's also the market that can afford to pay $50 a month for hosting.<p>WordPress/Joomla/Drupal are good targets, because if your customers are running on shared hosting, they are likely putting stress on their overloaded servers, and seeing outages/slowdown/threatening messages from the hosting company. You can give them a huge performance boost simply by moving their database to a separate machine.<p>The next step is to put a basic cache in front of the app server (Varnish, Squid, nginx). Watch your server load drop when logged-out, anonymous users hit the cache instead of an overloaded Apache machine pulling double duty as a MySQL box.<p>With Apache on its own machine, look into an opcode cache, and you can also offload static file serving to a CDN. You can do this easily by giving your customers a static path to change in their code (e.g. cdn.yourhostingdomain.com). You can cname this to Amazon CloudFront or MaxCDN, and then set the origin to a dedicated static file server (running nginx, or Varnish+Apache). Store the source files on Amazon S3.<p>You could run this whole setup with a handful of servers on Amazon or RackSpace, Linode, etc. for a few hundred $'s a month, and handle a few hundred to a few thousand clients paying $30-50 a month for a nice profit.<p>...until your cloud provider has a big outage...

I can think of a few drawbacks:<p>- Extremely commoditized, people shop around for hosting providers based on price and included features, so you better have a good offering<p>- Your service must be top notch and you need to be available to fix things pretty much instantly<p>- Reliability when reselling services is not in your control, so... good luck with that<p>Best of luck!