Something I have been doing of late is participating in answering user submitted questions on Yahoo! Answers. Its a great system they have in place over there, it can actualy be quite addicting running through the questions and answering them.

One question that came up was about what hardware to invest in for starting up a hosting company. Well, that poster is out of business likely before he starts :)

The cost involved and the resources involved in launching your own hosting infrastructure can be huge. And that is not taking into consideration maintenance of the hardware and security updates. The costs just balloon. Hosting is an easy and inexpensive business to get into without all of the leg work of setting up your own infrastructure. You can sign up for hosting reseller accounts with just about any website services provider or even domain name registrar these days. Some are great, some are not so great. But either way they are a better choice than doing everything in-house. This allows you to focus on selling your service to potential clients and to support existing clients. As your business grows its just a matter of upgrading your shared hosting account or dedicated server with your provider.

What some may not realize is that some of the most reputable and solid hosting providers out there actually don’t host their own infrastructure either. They outsource that to a larger company. And that is fine, they have taken care of choosing a stable base and have built upon that with great service and support.

So to any of you who are looking at getting into hosting and wanted to build your own infrastructure, DON’T.