Trust Me. It is a lousy business. Unless you start off with a very good work experience yourself, have highly skilled staff for management, administration and sales, it is going to be very difficult. And, you need a very good working capital.

Linux servers rule the earth. Windows are as stinking on servers as they are on PCs. Solaris rocks, but Sun servers are way too expensive, and you wouldnt need them for offering shared web hosting, or for hosting any ordinary application. Banks might need Sun servers with solaris, with Oracle and other serious backends installed, but a linux server can provide the baisc amenities that a normal website would need. Red Hat, CentOs, Fedora, Debian and freebsd are a few Unix Operating systems that can be used on servers.

There are quite a lot of Data Centres and Data Hotels all over the world. The best ones are said to be in the US. That is due to the aboundance of Bandwidth that they have got, and the resultant low price for the internet connections, and the low Co-Location costs.

If you plan to start off small, and if you have a low budget, and would like to do some sales on experimental basis, get a VPS or a Virtual Private Server and start selling from that.

You need a website. Dont start up with Modernbill or AWBS already. Start with a static site and paypal shopping cart.

Always have a team to back you up. Neverdo things on your own.

Have a budget and advertise well. Adwords is the best place to start.

Start with monthly packages. Take regular backups, because, if you think the project is a failure, you could atleast stop billing your clients and provide them with their backups.

Trust me, its the most difficult job in the world. You can transfer cargo, just put them in containers and load them on ships and unload them where ever you want, but backing up with plesk from the old server and moving it to the new server and restoring it there is the most difficult thing that I have ever done.

Personally I have shifted homes, I have shifted offices, shifted my own websites between servers before I started a hosting company, and now I find that all very easy. No matter how many men you have to do the work, you cant work any faster than the server would. Plesk is dead slow, and with all those sites working on the server, and with clients from all over the world, there is no off peek time for your server, you will never make it.

Plesk has a backup restore function, which you need to use from the remote desktop. Create the backup selecting resellers or domains in each task, and once its complete, move the backup file to the new server, and restore it there thru the plesk bakcup resotre function.

Sounds easy? It will, till you see it. I had 12 people working on it for 24 hours a day for nearly 20 days last year to get 1 server migrated. And in the last leg of the migration, the hard disk failed on the old server, and unfortunately, the backup files that we had created were yet to be moved to the new server, and all data was lost.

Just google with indyahozting and you will find out the bad reviews that we had got because of that. But still, we were quick enough to get the new server ready and ask people to upload the backups that they have had. Luckily most of the clients had their backups handy, and they restored all files, except for the few ones, who just decided to write about us on the forums.