Making money from spare webspace/bandwidth?

xplizit

Just wondering if anyone has done this before and how easy it is to set up and keep going... I believe it's called reselling.
Is the only way to find someone who needs the space, set up a subdomain for them, assign them so much space, give them the right permissions and ask for so much money every month? Or is there some kind of site which puts people like me in contact with people looking for cheap space and automates the process somewhat?
Or is there a completely different way of making a bit of spare cash with my extra space and bandwidth I haven't thought/heard about??

I have over 2TB of bandwidth and over 200GB of space and I'm using less than 10% of it at the moment so thought this might be an idea but really only if it's relatively simple to do.

Cheers!

xplizit

Oh and another thing... If I did go the reselling route, would people have to have something.mycurrentdomain.com as an URL or if they've registered their own domain, can they just have theirdomain.com?

sdj25

You can do this, and I helped out a few guys a couple of times running this. If you are to go out & offer this service to people. "Come and host your site with me for £3 a month" type thing.

Do you know how the servers work? Can you explain to them why .NET won't work on an 'out of the box' linux server. Do you know the difference between your GBs from your MBs? Your Private Nameservers from your IMAP email setups? Or your SSL from your SQL?

If you can answer yes to all of the above - and will be available to field queries every minute of the day, then yes set it up, it could be quite lucrative for you.

On the flip side - have a think about it, can you really make money from this? If I were Joe Bloggs wanting to create a website from scratch, why should I choose .. Xplizit Enterprises, over the likes of 1&1, or DreamHost, or UKWSD ?

ericthekidstoner

another thing to think about...

it's most probably deemed illegal by your ISP

xplizit

sdj25 wrote:

You can do this, and I helped out a few guys a couple of times running this. If you are to go out & offer this service to people. "Come and host your site with me for £3 a month" type thing.

Do you know how the servers work? Can you explain to them why .NET won't work on an 'out of the box' linux server. Do you know the difference between your GBs from your MBs? Your Private Nameservers from your IMAP email setups? Or your SSL from your SQL?

If you can answer yes to all of the above - and will be available to field queries every minute of the day, then yes set it up, it could be quite lucrative for you.

On the flip side - have a think about it, can you really make money from this? If I were Joe Bloggs wanting to create a website from scratch, why should I choose .. Xplizit Enterprises, over the likes of 1&1, or DreamHost, or UKWSD ?

Ok thanks that's what I thought... I know my GBs from my MBs but that's about it I'm pretty technically minded in general and I'm sure i could get my head around it all if I had the time to read up on it BUT it's all looking like it might be a bit too time consuming. I'm in my last year of uni at the mo so not much time for faffing around. Is there really no other way?

xplizit

ericthekidstoner wrote:

another thing to think about...

it's most probably deemed illegal by your ISP

I'm with Dreamhost and although they don't provide "proper" reselling facilities I'm sure I remember reading somewhere they still allowed you to do it. Could be wrong though...

edit: you said ISP not hosting company... why would that be illegal?

ericthekidstoner

ahh. I got the wrong end of the stick there... thought you were talking about hosting on your own server from home!

the only thing is to clarify is that they allow re-selling. Dunno much about Dreamhost so can't hazard a guess

A-Wing

Dreamhost is a US company and its UK peering network doesn't seem very good. You would be better off selling to a US market as the lag may annoy some UK customers. Unfortunately the market is quite saturated in the US (and getting that way here) so you will have to offer something unique to really make the money, and buy up a lot of adwords.

xplizit

Well they definitely allow it, I've checked.

I think this is going to be too much hassle for me though, at least to do it properly. I'll probably just ask a few mates if they'd be interested and sort them out. Far less stress I reckon