January 11th 2023

How Did You Build Your Hosting Site?

CrimsonRed is new to WHT and his first topic is to ask what did hosts use to build their hosting sites? He's been left feeling sad and unsatisfied by the lack of easy customization to the WHMCS front end, but also hasn't had much luck with the Wordpress bridge. He's asking what are the best practices for making attracting hosting sites? He's using the Lagom 2.0 WHMCS theme which he likes, but it's still left him wanting more due to the limitations of WHMCS in the design area. Having been waiting patiently for WHMCS' theme builder to be released, he feels as though there's no other choice in the meantime but to make a Wordpress site, link the pages, and hope nobody thinks it looks funny when they're directed to a distinctly different looking website (WHMCS). CrimsonRed is looking to expand and was thinking about running Facebook ads but thinks his site just looks too bare to be attractive enough to get new customers to sign up. So he's asking what everyone else typically does? HTML or Wordpress with links? WP Bridge? Editing WHMCS theme files directly? How would you put a hosting site together these days?

Join the discussion

Market saturation or not?

Anthony would like to invest in this sector of activity but hears from people around him that it is too saturated! He's aware of the considerable competition within the hosting industry but wonders if there's still a way to make your mark? The way he looked at it; In order to have something reliable, scalable, easy to use for customers and to stand out from the competition, he would have liked to set up a panel developed in Laravel and based on the APIs of SolusVM or Promox VE. Living in the vicinity of Montreal, Canada, he would also like to have his own infrastructure for quality purposes, the goal being to offer VPS/VDS. He asks if this is a worthwhile investment? If so, would Montreal be a good solution to serve clients in the east (Illinois, New York, Montreal)? How much should he invest in advertising up front? What are the best ways to acquire and retain customers? He has a total budget of about $15,000 - $20,000. Is this enough to get him up and running? Share your ideas in the thread.

Join the discussion

News from around the hosting industry

Our Industry News section is the place to find current headlines from around the world of hosting and infrastructure, but other general interest threads pop up in other sections of the forum, especially The Lounge. Here we we highlight just some of the interesting news items from around the forum:

• New partnership emerges for pan-India hyperscale data centers - Digital Edge, National Investment & Infrastructure Fund and AGP DC InvestCo have entered into a partnership to develop a pan-India portfolio of hyperscale data centers, operating under the brand name Digital Edge DC and with the intention of supporting the country's ongoing digital transformation and providing much needed capacity to the rapid growth of India's cloud industry. The first project is a $2B USD investment to build one of the largest data centers in India, a greenfield 300MW hyperscale facility in Navi Mumbai.
• Two Finnish data centers acquired by atNorth - They have reached agreement to acquire two data center facilities in Finland from Advania. The Nordic colocation provider will take over operations and management of the two facilities, and is also looking to build a third for regional expansion. The company was acquired by Partners Group in late 2021.
• Google wants more Nebraska expansion - They're seeking to expand its Nebraska footprint, adding 187 acres to its 270-acre data center site already under construction in northwest Omaha. The developer representing Google would control about 460 acres of "once rolling agricultural hillside". A 5-acre, never-plowed prairie had been bulldozed despite City of Omaha guidelines to protect natural features and Google's developer agreed to donate $100,000 to make up for the destruction.
• Microsoft planning North Carolina data centers - They are acquiring hundreds of acres of North Carolina land after announcing a data center project there. Late last year, the tech giant said it would invest at least $1B toward four North Carolina data centers, having previously said its investments in the area will be built out over a decade. Construction timelines haven't been shared.

Got some news of your own to share? If it's news from your own company it belongs in Web Hosting Industry Announcements (no ads please!). If you've scooped some news about something else going on in the hosting industry we'd love for you to share it in our Industry News section!

Browse our Industry News section

A new WHT section: Content Management Systems (CMS)

Threads about content management systems like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla pop up in different sections of WebHostingTalk on a regular basis, making it a little harder for them to be found. Not any more - We now have a section where you can talk about anything to do with CMS, including themes and plugins, optimization, editors, ideas for future features, requests for help, and anything else that comes to mind. We've already moved some of the more relevant recent threads into the new section. A matching advertising section will be added to WHT in the next few days.

Visit the new Content Management Systems section

Follow WebHostingTalk on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn