After a period of several months of uptime this weekend two of my hosting partners having some problems with their network or web servers. Actually nothing special if the down-time is very short. With one of the partner the problem was solved within 30 minutes but for the other one its was solved after almost 12 hours.

Next you ask you how to prevent your websites for this long down-times; changing the hosting provider? Setup a dedicated server? Or start your own hosting company?

While serving the internet I found the Daw Web Hosting Blog, a resource providing information and trends regarding web hosting. The information is not only for hosting end users but also for people who are thinking about to start their own hosting business. This article demonstrates exactly your chances in the hosting business:

Running a entry-level web server does not allow a new web host to provide business class service. That means you need to charge less than $10 per month for a shared hosting account. There are thousands of web hosts to compete you. Since most people get impressed of hosting offers such as 40,000 MB space and 900 GB bandwidth then you have a hard choice to make. To offer reasonable amount of monthly transfer and space and to get less customers or to start overselling.

While the last information is something with a bad meaning for a lot of hosting customers, is the explanation clear why starting companies don’t have a big choice. Because of the high starting costs (hardware, bandwidth, advertising etc.) a starting company need to do (almost) everything to get sales:

The only alternative for smaller companies is… to grow. To grow very fast. But fast growth in today’s shared web hosting market, means to sell for less than others.

Read the whole article here. I found on the same Blog site enough information to take the right decision for my future website hosting and also articles over webmaster related items and internet advertising.