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

4 points by withinthreshold ↗ HN
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?

6 comments

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

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