

Hosting for $1/month. Clients in Africa; me in Europe. Am i doing this wrong? - withinthreshold

I am starting a hosting "company" for clients in Africa and plan to charge $1/months for some basic hosting (sitting on top of a VPS). I am in Europe. Can this actually work, HN?
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kitaka
A second visit to this thread got me thinking and I got curious about your
reasons for offering cheap hosting for Africa.

I could only think of 2 reasons, either you are trying to do some good or you
just a guy on hustle trying to build something successful.

As a web/software developer from Africa who spends lots of time working on the
next facebook, I pay my bills from the revenues from my web hosting business.

By offering hosting for $1 per month you'll end up leaving a good number of
African tech hustlers broke. When you think about what you're doing, there is
no big difference between you and Franc Lucas.

I don't mean to judge your intentions and I totally understand you trying to
make a buck(its actually a cool idea and am sure it'd sell) but I thought it'd
be nice for you to know the impact you'd have on Africa.

#SmartHustle

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csense
What kind of customer are you focusing on? Personal homepages, blogs, basic
online presence for brick-and-mortar businesses, e-commerce sites, application
hosting?

What level of access do your clients have? Web interface only, FTP, UNIX
account with SSH, root on a Xen VM?

At the $1 level, transaction fees may eat up a large portion of your revenue.
What is your plan to deal with the issue?

Are you planning to make a profit, break even, or will the service require
financing indefinitely?

How will you make potential customers aware of your service?

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pilom
Looks like you would be competing with nosupportlinuxhosting.com. If you are
planning on offering a similar amount of support I can see it working. You
might be able to save money on staffing by hiring locally (in Africa) if you
can find the right skill sets.

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withinthreshold
I actually thought about answering support questions from locals by offering a
support package for an extra fee. But the idea of the referenced website
sounds very, very interesting.

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Joyfield
What does your service more favorable than others for clients in africa?

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withinthreshold
Providing reliable and very cheap hosting, while the major local providers
offer hosting packages starting at 4 USD/month. So, basically, it is a place
where you get your small website hosted and don't overpay (given the economy
of some African countries).

