I tried this once before, a good five years ago, when I started university. I bought myself a hosting resellers account on eBay for not a lot of money and got started hosting my friends’ sites. One of my friends was designing websites, and his customers created a steady, albeit small flow of income. Then my friend succumbed to cancer; a tragic loss, and it yanked the carpet out from under the feet of my little hosting operation.
A little while ago I decided that with little experience tinkering with that reseller account five years ago, as well as the knowledge about Linux, web servers, etc. I have gained since, put me in a good position to try again. On a slightly larger scale this time though. The name came first, on a particularly slow, rainy Tuesday evening around 18:45 I doodled the name JAQQLE on a piece of paper. The adventure had begun.
I still have friends who need web hosting, and their needs are enough for me to break even on a cPanel-based VPS I bought from HostV. I still had a license lying around for AWBS, which now comes in handy.
Armed with this I have set out to provide web hosting services to the foreign community in Japan, where I currently live, and my native Europe, where many of my friends still live. I hope that by focusing on two markets I’ll be fishing on a larger pond. Larger pond means more fish… Anyway, you get the picture.
At the moment I’m still folding a design around the AWBS software, which I hope to finish in a week or two. From there on I’ll need to figure out how to promote my services, because competition is fierce. I have some ideas though on the use of social media (Twitter, Facebook, this blog) to communicate directly with clients and potential clients.
So if anything, this enterprise is an experiment in social marketing. On this blog I will document my experiments, experiences and accomplishments. Please subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog to keep up with me, and with JAQQLE.
