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.