Rather than use the services of a web hosting company to host your web site you could start your own web hosting company. If your business is successful this could provide secondary income and lower the hosting costs for your own site(s).

Basically, there are two ways to start selling web hosting. The first way involves leasing business space, buying equipment, setting up servers, leasing T1 or T3 lines to connect to the Internet, finding clients, and hiring staff to provide 24 hour support. Quite complicated and not recommended for anyone without the technical know-how.

The second way is to become a re-seller for an established host. For a monthly fee you can have an allotment of disk space and bandwidth which can be used to sell to other people. Re-selling is usually anonymous – there is no visible connection to the parent host and you are free to set your own prices and develop your own ‘brand’.

Shared hosting allows thousands of people to host their own sites at a very reasonable cost. It has some drawbacks, however. Since hundreds of sites can be hosted on a single server resources such as CPU, disk space, and bandwidth have to be shared with your virtual neighbours. Shared resources are usually not a problem for small to medium sized sites. Your main limitation is the lack of control over system level software – http servers, mail servers etc. You don’t have any choice of operating system and you cannot compile programs or do administrative tasks such as setting up Spam filters or firewalls.

If you have a large and complex website that receives a lot of traffic you may find that shared hosting is limiting your growth and the capacity to serve your customers. It may be time to move on to dedicated hosting. Shared hosting involves placing many websites on one server. All sites share the resources of that server such as disk space and bandwidth. Dedicated hosting means that instead of renting space on a server, you rent an entire server for your sole use.

Dedicated web hosting is much more expensive than shared hosting because the cost of operating the server is not divided between various accounts. The advantages of dedicated hosting include the freedom to use the resources of the server as you please. There are many different dedicated hosting packages to choose from. Their prices depend largely on the physical setup of the server computer. Just as with your home computer, faster processors and bigger hard drives cost more.

If you have gone through the trouble of building a web site and hosting it with a reliable company you obviously want your website to be available 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Downtime can result in lost sales and customer frustration.

Unfortunately, there are many technical problems beyond your control that can cause your web site to go down or become sluggish. Server hardware and software can fail and your host may schedule downtime for maintenance chores. Speedy recognition of failures is the best defence to getting things back on track, so many companies offer website monitoring services that automatically alert you if your site goes down.

Now that your web site is up and running you want to know how many people are visiting your site and how they are finding it. Most web hosts give you access to this information (and a lot more) in the form of web statistics.