As I mentioned in my previous post we (that is, me and my friend who is co-owner) decided to stop with our web hosting business. The reason is pretty simple: it’s getting too expensive for us.
When we started out we had a vision what we wanted: accessible and understandable webhosting for small businesses and individuals with a special eye on security. A website was swiftly made and started with friends and aqcuiantances as customers.
Now 5 years later we are facing the choice between a large financial risk or just stopping. Over the last few years costs for co-locating our servers has exploded to the insane; our hosting costs have almost trippled since we started with the same specifications. And then this year SIDN (Dutch TLD maintainer) decided to up the ante by raising the price.
In the end it was not hard to make the decision.
Granted, we could have done things better ourselves too. If we’d been more active in getting customers, if we’d spend more time on it, if, if, if. All of this is of no use in retrospect, safe for the moment I decided to strike out again with another business idea.
The one thing which has been central in our failure is in my opinion preperation. If we’d have had everything ready from the get-go we would not have needed to invest so much time in developing tooling and could have spent more time on aqcuiring customers.
With the end of WebComfort I will have more time on working on some ideas I’ve had for some time. Hopefully one of those will fuel me with a renewed desire to undertake a new enterprise.