Businesses who run their own web hosting should consider using their hosting facilities to host the website of others. They can do this either by becoming a full blown host, with their own hosting staff and department, or simply offering colocation services. If you have a facility already being used for your own hosting, then why not share it? It is already there so you can make a profit out of it.

If you have advanced knowledge of hosting and are wiling to invest, you can become the hosting provider for other websites. You can add hosting to your existing business meaning the potential for bigger profits. You could employ specialist staff to run your hosting department, and these employees could then run the hosting of your own website as well as the sites of your hosting clients. If handled in the right way having your own hosting facility could turn into a major business opportunity.

Those without the relevant knowledge or ambition to offer advanced hosting solutions could still co-locate the servers of other websites. Colocation normally consists of clients hosting their servers at a data centre. Why don’t you become this data centre? Clients will lease rack space from you but be in charge of the actual hosting themselves. You will be using the facilities you already have in place for the hosting of your own websites. With this colocation option, you provide the environment, but your clients take care of the rest. This may not be as profitable but could pay for the facility, meaning the hosting of your website will effectively be paying for itself.

The good thing about this is that you are only using the facilities that you already have. Although some investment will be necessary, if you only have a few fairly small clients it shouldn’t be too significant. You have everything you need for your own purposes so you are just making this into another profitable part of your business. Most websites only use a small amount of the bandwidth available to them, and this will make use of that extra bandwidth. What’s more – you will be making money out of it. Bandwidth is just one example of the areas where you will be using what you already have for this extra benefit.

Even if you are only offering Colocation facilities to clients you will still have other things to consider. Security will have to be high as you are hosting other people’s websites; people who are paying you to make sure everything is secure. If there are security problems, technical faults, power failures, or other issues you are responsible for them and you will need to make sure they are solved. At the end of the day, if you are offering a service, you are responsible for making sure the services is a good one for your clients. You need to make sure you know what you are doing (or employ people who do), and you have to take your hosting venture seriously.

Andrew Marshall ©