Your opinion, Am I on the right track?

[davesplace80]

Ok I have a 5 year old and when I am trying to teach him something I ask him to repeat it back to me, so please put me on track. Here is my plan to build a hosting company, and sell templates, add a Vonage affiliate when I start getting some traffic. I really like the idea of $100\day but at this point I think a small profit will make me happy.

I started a blog today with 1 post and will add to that as much as I can. Continue that to get more pages listing in Google. Start posting articles about my profession ( Landesk and software distribution ) . I have a R\C club website going and it seems to be gaining ground in Google. http://www.krc.org in case someone in R\C planes. All of the news posts seem to be attractive to Google because they are crawling it much more then my current site.

I am hoping to get a few people just starting out that need some free webspace, my baby package to start out. I plan on monitoring the hits they get and when they hit some defined rate have them start paying. This way we can swap notes on what is working and what isn't and build some potential customers. I am new in town and anyone that does even a little homework will know that so why not be upfront about it.

I guess the one thing I have going for me is this is a SEO template. It shows up pretty well to search engines.

Please give me your honest opinion of this approach. What should I do different?

Thanks
Dave

[Chris]

Don't get into web hosting. You have low margins, high competition, high customer service needs, security issues, legal issues, and did I mention low margins?

[davesplace80]

Well I asked :-) What about the Template side of this? Any thoughts? If you have any "pet" project ideas and need some one to test them out I could setup some accounts.

[MaxS]

Don't get into the Template side either, many of the same downsides apply.

[davesplace80]

Thanks for the advice guys. You just save me a bunch of wasted time. Are there any other specific target groups to stay away from?

[Westech]

I'd definitely stay away from web hosting if your plan is to compete with the established companies for customers nationwide or worldwide. I think web hosting is still an excellent business to get into if you target only your local market. There are a ton of local small business owners who will gladly pay more for hosting that comes with someone local to talk to and extra handholding and support when they need it.

Same thing with templates. If you're going to try to sell them to everyone on the internet and compete with the big established template sites then you'll have a rough time. If you sell them as add-ons to your local webhosting customers, most of whom probably need a website to go along with their hosting anyway, it could be a nice additional revenue stream.