I haven’t had a chance to sit and read all the replies so far, but thank you to all that responded.
Well i got into hosting business in 2003, started as a unix shell account/irc shell provider sh3lls.net and become the largest shell provider within few years, i think i had about 20 shell servers at some point of time, had few thousand shell customers, even launched VPS, VPN and Web Hosting services, but then after running it for about 12 years i sold it out for a good price, though the new owner changed name etc… and ruined it.
I started Sh3lls for fun, I was using IRC at that time and start trading shell accounts on my home PC (used to give a shell account on my home to other users and take a shell account from them) I already had some server management experience in College but shell trading helped me to gain a lot more knowledge, then I decided to start with shell account/unix shell account hosting but it was just for fun, never thought that it could grow so big, bought my first server from Psychz in 2003 and then within the first year itself i bought the IRC Section from Psychz (Even psychz was into unix shell hosting at that time) and within 2-3 years i had like 20 shell servers all with like atleast 400-500 shell users and a /24 per server. I think it grew so much because i was enjoying my work.
Now I’ve started hostEONS.com and going to run it for a very long time.
Already getting good response, have reached 7 VPS Nodes just within 2 months of launching the services.
I think once you know how to run this business and know how to get clients it’s not really difficult to run a hosting business.
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-
what did you think you could offer that someone else hadn’t?
– higher bandwidth (100mbit unmetered was unusal at the time), better specs, great prices -
was it just for fun or did you intend to try and make serious money from it?
– business -
how tough were the first few months?
– tough. First 5 years were toughest. -
how long did it take before you felt it was successful?
– ~8 years -
would you do it again?
– no -
what do you feel you learnt along the way?
– work hard, be great to good clients, don’t get distracted by noise
That is an awesome story and made me really miss the days of shell accounts. Checking out your plans right now 
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I didn’t realize you were sh3lls I remember seeing that a lot, but never used it myself.
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I love the candidness of this reply! If you don’t mind my asking, if so, then what drives you to continue doing it until now?
I really enjoy my work now, and have a family to support these days, which is why I continue along now. For the first 8 years I kept going because I was heavily invested, others relied upon me to keep going, and I wanted to see ROI.
For the first 8 years the ROI was non-existent, and the time could have been better spent working on way more profitable projects. If I knew then what I know now I would have kept working on CDN or other SaaS/service style projects with higher margins and better use of my coding skill-set instead of a dedi/colo service.
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I’d love to do it again tbh.
“How did you get started as a provider?”
Alcohol was involved.
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