8 months in - Ask me anything on what it's like to run a small provider.
ZizzyDizzyMC
Provider
Well it's been a while!
It's been 8 months since Z Plus has been public! Woo!
I've been busy irl, and working a lot. Haven't had time to release new offers since I've been busy re-tooling things and working out ways to provide the best service possible to my clients. I wanted to make a thread to talk about a few things I've learned along the way. For those who may just be buyers and are interested in what it's like, or people wanting to get into the hosting business.
Lets start off with how it started.
2014 - I start a project to archive ponies, quickly getting lots of TB of data.
2016 - My project starts offering hosting to other pony websites for free.
2020 - I start a website that gets attacked, and cancel cultured a few dozen times, I respond by getting an IP block and starting my own host, knowing that 99% of the abuse mails sent were fraudulent and were poor attempts at self-flagging.
2022 - World is cooking and I start offering invite-only hosting for FOSS projects, friends, open source, at-risk sites where funding was low / non-existent.
2023 - I offer my first public hosting offer here as a test of the equipment, software, billing support etc. It was wildly successful but I'll admit the service SUCKED. I ran that for about 5 months before ending sales entirely, and letting clients drain off the node until there was one left, which I paid them to leave / migrate so I could decommission the Intel Compute Stick from service.
2024 - I offer my second public hosting offer, this time focused on a niche in the market for low bandwidth, high storage capacity. This offer is still going and has been successful in the sense that there's been relatively little issue.
2025 - Earlier this year I started trialing a high performance compute option with high storage abilities. We suffered a long outage due to a destructive weather event. Various small issues that took some time to track down and fix. I have committed to long term support and building better infrastructure. We recently got AC in our server room now, which means the equipment is a lot happier. Next is going to be backup power, and internet. My number 1 priority is still going to be data integrity, so even if everything is turned off, as long as client data is not lost I still consider it a success. Issues with networking to resolve, bad routes etc.
Ask me anything, about problems I needed to solve or overcome, just wanna chat.
Comments
How have you managed finances so far?
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
any $7 dealz
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
Are you selling out to PureVoltage ?
We accept Karma donations for the last flan. 🍮 affbrr
How do you manage the carpel tunnel syndrome?
Michael from DragonWebHost & OnePoundEmail
How much profit have you made so far? What are the margins like?
This is good. Keep trying. Keep learning.
Maybe LES has a private providers thread for those who are registered to collaborate. I know OGF goes. Have a network community to help. Ask questions here too.
Good luck on your business and hope it booms.
$5/yr deals pls
I moved all my websites to Carrd, and cancelled all my idlers.
Save the earth, don't idle.
Clopping, obviously.
I'm giving people shells on a 486 before but I would never consider time sharing a compute stick.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
So far I have enough clients to cover IP costs / ARIN every year. Being how I haven't really advertised beyond my initial thread this is expected. Average invoice is around $4 / month, about $1 goes to fees and taxes.
Quite a few honestly, better off waiting for the official release of our 9900x systems with redundant VM drives. The testing node has held up quite well though. Not yearly though, I learned very quickly that 7/year is for established providers to get their name out, and is strictly loss leader product unless it's on ipv6, in which case it's profitable - if you don't consider workload for abuse tickets.
Margins at my scale is 0, however if I tripled my client numbers I'm looking at about 100 / month in profit per ~35 clients on average. You're gonna have a lot of variance between providers. I don't overprovision, which lowers my maximum theoretical profit margin by a considerable amount - it vastly increases customer experience though when it comes to resources.
We'll know for sure what margins look like on newer hardware when everyone on the old storage system gets the free upgrade to the new one - so I can turn off the old hardware that's guzzling electricity.
I'm broke, not poor. Conisdering I'm going to own everything required to run the business because I own websites that require this level of hardware it is extremely unlikely I'd ever sell to anyone, much less someone who considers their voltage to be pure. I like my voltage dirty, so the UPS has a reason to exist.
I suffer.
I mean it wasn't too bad for clients, it performed better than quite a number of offers here at the time. For me, however, it was a nightmare to configure networking via wifi. However if you know of a hypervisor that works on a 486 I have a few I'd offer up for memes.
Fuck this 24/7 internet spew of trivia and celebrity bullshit.
DesQview. Possibly.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
Make sure you get Desqview/X though
It's hard to port xoj over to X11R4.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
LOL ... I hadn't seen that one.
It's been memory holed. Can probably still find it on an old slackware CD.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
My best wishes.
Check my closet or other cave
The Yeti has left the building.
Is "ponies" industry slang?
https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/brony/
Its a rabbit hole I do not recommend digging in, tbh.
Basically, some extra autistic individuals liking ponies quite a bit more than an ordinary person. It attracts a fair share of degenerates too, but I'm not qualified to speak on the % of the total "pony" community these individuals are.
Controversies around the letter group of individuals, were most likely the reason behind cancel campaigns against "pony" websites.
No I'm just a brony with so much hardware I wanted to share my love of archiving. Of all the sites that attracted attention it was always the archives I hosted.
Rabbit hole goes deep, there's a lot of crazies tbh. Not that I'm not crazy, but if I'm telling you I'm one of the more stable ones that should tell ya something. Other notable achievements include having princess luna engraved on a part on the ISS and there's a deep sea diving rig with pones on it. Surprising amount of bronies and furries run the tech industry now. It's really because autistic people are good at it and autism tends to attract other hobbies.
This DesQView X stuff is awesome. Thanks for teaching me something new.
$3/yr deals ?
Why?
Do you really consider 8 months a period that enables you already to give good advice? a pregnancy takes longer and even then a woman probably cannot really tell you much about having a child.
with all the offer switches it looks more like you haven't even found out yet, if it's boy or girl ;-) ;-)
To be fair, he never says anything about good advice just his experiences. Even just learning what went wrong might be useful/interesting.
Hmm okay, maybe I understood it wrong then... carry on.
Pretty much this.
I've only had a few different offers, I removed plans that weren't in use as I decided to focus on 1 subject rather than branching out - branches create leaves and leaves require regular maintenance and pruning. That's something I've learned already in 8 months.
As for migrating clients over from one offer to another, it's a direct upgrade for the client as they'll be moving from Xeon E5-2690v4's to Ryzen 9900x's with the same ram and cpu allotment. Much faster, granted it is also going to be a pain to migrate on my end.
It'll end up saving power too, which saves me money as a provider since I pay for power. This makes my offers more sustainable in the end, and makes it closer to being profitable. The newer setup is scalable as well, so I can scale up if needed / desired. I probably won't though, I like the smaller aspect of it.
I am sure you have an actual job that pays for your food, rent/mortgage, outings, etc.
Curious what it is.
DM us for private tracker invite.
If he/she is from a middle/lower income country, web hosting can possibily pay for food/rent/mortgages and probably have a lot more to spare
Alright, I have ignored this thread for long enough... So here are my questions:
1. How many times a week do you cry into your server rack?
2. Have you named your uptime monitor, and do you whisper to it at night?
3. On a scale from 1 to "I now speak fluent router," how much sleep have you lost?
4. What’s more unstable: your service or your mental state during a DDoS?
5. Do your family members still think you "just fix Wi-Fi for a living"?
6. At what point did you realize your cat was your unofficial sysadmin?
7. Do you dream of load balancers or do the load balancers haunt your dreams?
8. What’s your favorite flavor of burnout: DNS loop or billing system bug?
9. Have you ever tried to pay rent with bandwidth?
10. When you say "small provider," do you mean the servers fit under your bed?
He is from the USA.
$7
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
I do cybersecurity as a day job, my hobbies include everything from VR to building the electronics required to do so, servers, archiving, I do mechanic work and trade cheap beater cars. That sort of thing. This is just a hobby I let get too big.
@ZizzyDizzyMC what is your exit strategy?
I moved all my websites to Carrd, and cancelled all my idlers.
Save the earth, don't idle.
If I had to leave the market, end payment acceptance and just let it run till something broke. Free services till it ends. No really, that's the exit strategy. Obviously try to give everyone as long as possible, but if I'm closing how tf am I supposed to expect people to pay up until the servers shut off. I'd assist with migrations where I can, those with 10-20tb storage boxes with me would be given the option to take a physical drive loaded with their data in the mail too, if I can.
Not an exit strategy buddy. Just short line of sight. Exit planning helps you think strategically on how to work smarter for customers.
Acquisitions are common to acquire customers in this industry. You have a small fortune to make.
I moved all my websites to Carrd, and cancelled all my idlers.
Save the earth, don't idle.
Oh, I use the resources I have for other projects, and do not foresee them ever NOT needing those resources such as the IP blocks etc. If I had to end the paying services side - I have nothing to sell. I sure am not treating my clients as a resource to be sold to another provider. They can move on their own terms, or don't move at all.
Heavily disliked it when I was a paying client of a provider I won't name here, who sold their business and now I get spam on that email because that provider sold my info for marketing purposes. Shitty. Not happening.
Name and shame so I can block their shit as well and send it the spam guys
The Yeti has left the building.
And always sign up with throwaway emails on all providers. I have unique email aliases for every site I sign up with. So if i start seeing spam, I know exactly who sold my email (looking at you redmart sg).
There is a provider here that has my email. I know for a fact I have never signed up with them and the only place this email was used in the provider's location was over 10 years ago. That place is now defunct of course. I have their emails blocked on all machines I own/operate and will never do business with them.
The Yeti has left the building.
Can I see your hairline?
Amadex • Hosting Forums • root.hr
Hairline? You implying I am not already bald?
Why wouldn't you name them?
Did you drink before or did this start it all?
The Yeti has left the building.
Dude was getting tired of all of his clopping shit taken offline before he could download it.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
Oh so you're that guy who caused that Palo Alto Network fiasco.
/s
DM us for private tracker invite.
Do you do any advertising on social media ?
I don't, lots of spam traffic comes from advertisements in general.
Do you eat the spam or?
The Yeti has left the building.
Never really liked spam. Didn't like spam to mail, or spam calls either. Spam users who sign up only to port blast or speedrun any % glitchless onto IP rep databases.
Yeah I could go without spam.
I like your DC idea, post some pictures.
I think you should make a Discord channel or something for people to hangout there (unless you already have one).
Get some hosting at https://drserver.net .
You're reaching a year in now! Will there be anniversary offers?
datalix's aff #1 fan