I think starting a hosting company is a very easy process these days. You buy your first dedicated server or a VPS and you start by choosing your software. Some choose to build their own standalone site, but most stick to the popular duo: Paymenter and Pterodactyl.
I want to talk about Paymenter and Pterodactyl some more. I think when starting a hosting company, you will probably start with the easiest option: game hosting. Most choose to start with games like Minecraft, Rust, or FiveM. Setting these up may seem hard, but Pterodactyl actually makes it pretty easy! You first download Pterodactyl, go through the setup process, and bam, all of a sudden you have a cool looking… no. When you first download it, it may seem disappointingly ugly and hard to set up, but over time you will learn to set up an egg and create your first server. Now you think to yourself, “How am I going to sell this to people?” That is when Paymenter comes into the picture. Paymenter is an open source billing program built for hosting companies.
So you get to the steps of installing it and setting up the web hosting for it, and bam, you land on the page and once again “hmmm.” Yeah… I got to admit, when I first saw it I also thought, “Hmm, this is pretty empty and not even good looking,” but we’ll get to that later. So you manage to make an account for yourself and see a familiar thing: an admin panel. You saw it before on Pterodactyl, and luckily for you, Paymenter’s admin area is really easy. You set up your payment gateway, your products, and you link your Pterodactyl, so it is now automated and you can finally receive payments.
But then you look at both sites and think, “Hmm, is there any way I can make this look better?” That is when you will discover themes and add ons. You will find yourself on platforms like BuiltByBit and see dozens of cool themes, add ons, etc. You look at the price tags and realize the sentence your dad once told you, “Nothing in life is free.” Sure, you don’t need them to use both, but they do upgrade both a lot. It’s like a burger without fries on the side. Sure, you don’t need the fries, but they do make a greater combo. So you start looking for your first theme and find some really cool ones for maybe around 20 to 50 USD. You finally decide on the Citadel theme for Paymenter and the Arix theme for Pterodactyl. After that, you maybe see some cool add ons like Minecraft plugin installers or tools that completely automate the process.
In the end, you’re left with a full cart and it sums up to about $100, and you think once again, “Is it worth it? I don’t need it,” and you still buy them because hey! It looks amazing now. So you start installing all of them and feel like you’re opening presents on Christmas morning. Well, now everything is automated and it looks great. Now there is just one more thing missing… customers! So you do what everyone does. You start a Discord server and promote your hosting like its value is about to shoot up to millions of customers. You realize your hosting may not be the best on the market, but hey! I spent all this money and I’m going to get it back!
So you get your first customers and start making some profit. You realize that hosting comes with some issues. You’re handling tons of tickets from customers needing help with questions or server problems, and naturally you’re fed up with all this and you decide to dial in a friend to help you with your adventure. Now your friend handles most of the tickets and you can focus on making money. But no, it’s not that easy. You find yourself fixing bugs, setting up servers, and having some work on your plate every day.
After a while of hosting game servers, you decide to step up your game and you want to offer VPS hosting. This is where you will meet Proxmox and a lot of pain. At this point, you’re fixing problems left and right and it’s hard to keep up with everything, so maybe you decide to dial in another friend to help you with managing the game servers and you focus on the process of setting up a VPS. You realize you don’t know half of what you’re doing or what is on the screen and find yourself hopelessly searching through old forum posts of the people before you.
Now in the final part, the big question. Now that you have seen behind the scenes of starting your own hosting, you’re probably wondering to yourself, “This isn’t that hard, I wanna do this.” Now I’m going to give you some advice before you make that choice. First, think of the question: why do you want to do it? Is it because you purely want to make money, or do you want to challenge yourself or want to learn? For all of the people who just want to make money, there is one more question, “Do you know what the f*ck you’re doing?” If that is yes, then I say go ahead and start your journey. If you want to challenge yourself or do it for fun, I think it’s not bad to try it out, see how it goes, and maybe you will succeed.
The final question for the people who want to make money or do it for fun. Think of one last thing. There are tons of hosting companies nowadays, and ask yourself, “Why should people choose me? What do I offer that other people don’t?” If you can answer that, I wish you a safe journey through the canyons of hosting!