Creating a WordPress Hosting Service under Windows
The results were sobering. Especially at peak times, the loading times of the low-cost provider are very long, which inevitably leads to a poor search engine ranking.
I then informed myself about the options available to me to minimize this bottleneck. One solution seemed to be premium hosting services. These hosting packages, inevitably more expensive, offer the best hardware and dedicated resources for the website.
WordPress Hosting Service
99% of my websites run with WordPress. To make the websites I created faster, there was the option to switch to a premium hosting provider. Alternatively, I could set up my own web server which would provide the necessary hardware and resources.
Now I thought, since I already have a great knowledge of web servers - cloud services and automation, and I've been dying to make a push into Microsoft Azure, now would be the perfect time to do it and create my own Hosting Solutions for WordPress.
What is needed for a hosting service
Now I needed a control panel for web hosting and server data. About 18 years ago I already worked with Plesk and knew that this is a suitable software. Alternatively I knew cPanel and WebAdmin. However, since I have more experience with Plesk and was very satisfied with it for my experiments at that time, I decided to use Plesk.
Having already worked with Hosting Controller, I was now looking for another automation software for web hosting solutions, domain service and more that was cheaper. Through my research I came across WHMCS which offered exactly the features I needed to build a web hosting service for WordPress.
Then I did some more research on how to become a domain reseller and offer domains with my hosting packages. There are a few registrars to choose from. There are advantages and disadvantages with the individual providers. We decided to start with eNorm. eNorm offers super integrity to WHMCS.
Now came the most difficult part. Servers! Dedicated servers, virtual servers, own servers, rented, managed, cloud, which provider. There was a lot to consider and I had to do a lot of calculations to find a reasonable way.
The Choosen Tools
WordPress Hosting Service with Microsoft Azure
I have tested different providers and compared the prices. I have calculated how much turnover I can make per server and how many customers or websites can be provided on a single server.
After extensive research and calculations, I decided on Microsoft Azure out of various prositive aspects.
One of the reasons for choosing VPS was that less start-up capital is required. Setting up your own server infrastructure in a data centre requires quite a lot of start-up capital, as well as additional running costs such as maintenance, replacement of defective hardware, possible employee costs and more.
- Price, Not the cheapest but also not the most expensive provider.
- Features, In addition to VPS, Microsoft Azure offers a whole arsenal of useful services with which the business can be expanded.
- Scalability, The VPS servers at Microsoft Azure are theoretically arbitrarily scalable and therefore offer optimal conditions to start with small servers to keep costs low at the beginning and to add more performance if required over time.
First of all, I would like to offer a hosting service focused on WordPress. Selling domains and offering email services.
Other ideas would include
Cloud storage with Nextcloud for example.
Microsoft Office 365, Exchange and email sales.
ASP.Net hosting
Managed Virtual Private Server Hosting.
App Services – Database Services
Microsoft Dev Ops
Skype for Business / Microsoft Teams
The world is open to us!
