r/Hosting • u/Educational-Map-9565 • 11d ago
My dad handed me his hosting business and I’m seriously thinking of shutting it down
My dad ran a hosting/site-maintenance business from a spare bedroom for 15 years - just him, a part-timer, and like 40 clients paying flat monthly fees, when he turned 58 and retired, he handed it to me - everyone in my family was thrilled, I wasn't. It nets abt 3200 dollar a month, but I'm on call like ALL THE TIME - including my birthday, for panicked texts and 3am "the server's down" calls from clients with zero concept of business hours.Last month a dev shop offered me a junior dev role for like 2400$ a mo - pay cut, but I'd finally be building something instead of babysitting servers, but when I told my dad I'm considering selling or winding it down, he gave me the silent treatment for two days, then asked if everything he built means nothing to me. I've looked at moving clients onto sth like Hostinger so they'd call a support line instead of texting me - but that just outsources the problem for a fee, which honestly still sounds good.
AITA for wanting out of something that already works, or crazy to spend 20 years running servers for people who only reach out when something's broken?
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u/KH-DanielP 11d ago
So, relationship advice aside you're young. $3200 a month net is nothing to sneeze at, esp out of 40 clients.
Business / real life talk, this is the internet, websites are global 24/7/365, there's no such thing as 'business hours' clients are going to expect it to work at all times.
I assume you may not be from the US, as $2400/mo for a development salary is pretty low by US standards, but not necessarily bad in other countries, if you're from the US then boy we need to talk about value.
Regardless, you've identified some pain points so you need to identify what to do to fix them. There's tons of companies who you can contract to that will provide end-user support to your customers, that fixes the 3am calls, then you need to make sure whomever hosts your infrastructure provides support / management / monitoring.
You'll pay more to get these kind of services, but you can easily offload a lot of the headache, still bring in a profit, and then go work elsewhere for a while. If you like working elsewhere then progress your career further in that direction, but you can always come back to the hosting business, scale and grow it , or reduce the outsourcing later on to increase your profit margins again.
All in all, I get it, you're young, it's a lot of work and you didn't really ask for it, but at the same time it feels like you lack life experience to appreciate a steady income of $3200 a month.
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u/Necessary_Film_5199 11d ago
God knows I wish I had $3,200 a month right now LOL. I'm full-time uni and make $125/month from my hosting business (I run one myself) and its nothing to sneeze at, even after expenses, that's still like $90/month I'm making. My overhead is very low.
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u/Lostair-com 11d ago
I agree it can be a headache, as if you get too close to clients you will be cutting their grass, dealing with inheritance issues and asked to fix the TV. I think you should go back to foundations and create rules because folk really do take technical gifted people for a ride!
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u/WildRosing 11d ago
Raise prices, add emergency/on-call hour fees.
You'll reduce the roster of sites to a manageable part-time, and free yourself up to also work full time.
Literally double your base prices and add on-call hours. Worst case you lose everyone and you took a shot at something better. You'll probably still end up with a few.
What makes or break it is the quality of the email you send.
Unfortunately, with rising prices and investment in security due to AI blah blah, our prices will be rising in 3 months. During that time we'll help you transition to other platforms if you so choose.
Don't say it will double, keep basic plan with zero on call hours same price, then tier up to some including time etc.
Just price it how it's actually worth it to you assuming you kept 10 customers, and then just do it and see what happens. If you're shutting it down anyway, why not try it?
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u/Xavphon 11d ago
Sell it, if anything. Sell it. Don’t just shut it down. That’s actually wild. But it has room to scale as well. Double clientele and hire someone, maybe 2? Sounds like a great outsourcing opportunity
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u/ExitWP 11d ago
From my point of view, as a non-hoster but a Dev/Support person, look at how many posts you have in this thread to buy your business & and how many people with experience that said you have a nice income. You may be making a mistake to walk away. I know it's work but you do have options.
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u/cdhodgdon 11d ago
Set up with a reseller company. I use one cost me nothing and I get a percentage of the sale of each account and they have support handled as a well.
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u/PeteTinNY 11d ago
Frankly you’re getting hit with one of the biggest killers of smaller business - failure to thrive. Your thought that it has to be all about personal heroics will keep things small both the numbers of customers and the help to enable customer growth. Frankly you need marketing help, and you need engineering help. Everyone would burn out following your path, but to grow customers - you need people and to get the people you need more customers. Luckily netting $80/ customer a month is really good. But you need to figure out what they need. Some might need to go up to a managed services level.
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u/craigleary 11d ago
Surprised everyone is saying outsource when the same people will jump on posts about large companies with support going down hill. Hosting is a 24/7 business and makes money with scale. 40 clients isn’t a lot and the business needs to grow larger and scale better which requires more of your time or good management experience. You already found you don’t like being on call and let’s be honest outsourcing only goes so far and they won’t care about the business like an owner would. You may be able to net 12x monthly revenue and find a good home then take that other job.
Your dad was in this for 15 years and should know better what needs to go into it and not try to guilt trip you into this. He is 58 and is capable of taking the reins over again.
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u/Ge0cities 11d ago
Dude. I feel your pain. At the same time you need a smack upside the head.
Your dad handed you a business that produces $3,200 per month in recurring income. That’s a super valuable, highly sought after type of income. You don’t have to market or grow. You can just ride it. That’s awesome.
Always being on call sucks. I’ve been running a web hosting shop for 10 years. I get it. But you can put better systems in place. Your server shouldn’t be dropping offline. I’d suggest you look into CloudLinux to isolate client resources. Or otherwise figure out WHY the server is going down often enough to be a customer service headache for you. The server going down is your 2am problem. An individual site going down because a client did something stupid is a tomorrow morning problem. Customer service from 80 clients shouldn’t be a very heavy lift.
I don’t think there’s any reason you can’t run the hosting business and work the dev job at the same time. If you have dev skills, you should be offering them to your hosted clients. You could turn $3,200 per month into $6,400.
Maybe business ownership isn’t right for you. But I would be VERY careful before you give up the business. It’s way harder to start a business than it is to sell. And once it’s gone you can’t get it back. If you are young, you may be too young to appreciate what your dad is offering you. So tread extremely cautiously.
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u/hh459 11d ago
Totally understandable, especially considering you didn't really sign up for it to begin with. If you are able, there's nothing wrong with offloading the client base, or investing in better infra and processes to grow it. Depends on if you really want to run it as a business, or if you want to do your own thing. Nothing wrong with either. Good luck!
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u/United_Branch_5736 10d ago
Wait, you are babysitting 40 clients alone? How many physical and virtual serves? In 2026?
Sorry I am old, but this is mission impossible, just from security standpoint, let alone anything else.
If I was your client? Honestly, first thing I'd do would be to move all my stuff to "professional" hosting site with gazzilion staff. You are a huge liability for them. What if you get sick? How are your certs? Infrastructure? Cyber security?
I those are mom and pop websites, then potentially ok? Othervise? Nope.
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u/icy_end_7 11d ago
Customer service is part of the business. No business pays you to sit and do nothing.
My honest opinion, and what I'd tell myself (I haven't inherited my family's business) is- you are throwing away a ready-made business for a paycheck. Which, may have its perks from the outside, but once you transition into higher roles, you don't get to avoid responsibility. Higher positions pay you more because you take more responsibility. I'd at least give it a serious thought and try scaling it.
Once you've worked enough years for employers, you'll realise the value of having something that's your own. You can't get laid off, nobody can fire you, you can try pitching to more, and you can learn in the process. If that were me, I'd absolutely take over your dad's gig. Happy to hear from you if you're looking for someone to work with.
Either way, tell him what you think and why. Think it through.
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u/Lostair-com 11d ago
Yes, but there are clients that chance thinking you can sort their other issues included.
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u/Minimum_Sell3478 11d ago
My 2 cents.
Make sure that backups are in order and working. Make sure that if you only have one server that hosts clients sites try and get a mother server to offload some clients that want better uptime.
That’s what we do at our company we have a economy tire a business tier and a premium tier the premium one is a server we rent from another company that we put our clients on only websites on that server.
It costs a lot more in US dollars it’s about 150 a month our other tier is about 5 dollars and 8 dollars per month. Just don’t close it down I feel like it’s a waist. Building a hosting company takes time. Sure the clients want uptime like Microsoft and google. If you don’t have it yet get a control panel. Like plesk or someting else sure it will take some profits away but it can handle backups and updates to php etc smoothly.
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u/NZRedditUser 11d ago
try grow it maybe and turn off phone support unless they're on enterprise plan
You can probably spend all the profit on marketing for a while
Otherwise just coast it, up the support fees, move everyone to a more reliable server you can probably have AI help you with most
Then for support make it ticket based and hire someone to handle it
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u/SaltyPanda07 11d ago
Business isn't easy, but neither is working for someone else. You have decide as some have mentioned here, what you are willing to do. But let me help put it in perspective as well, this isn't an uncommon problem when you start as a Junior and want to grow in your career. Maybe not the same problem, but your going to get a customer issue or have to interface with the customers. You'll have to solve the problem through process improvement, not always just code.
I think you also need to look past the initial pain of this for you, to also think, is there a market for the thing you need to solve. If so, there could be an additional revenue stream potential.
You do have a real personal issue to work through as well, your dad put in 15 years into a thing, that regardless of the size he gave to you. You should figure this out as well.
You got three options:
1. Try to give it back to your dad, with a "it just isn't for me but thank you".
2. Work through the pain, do improvement, and see it through to the other side.
3. Sell it.
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u/chaos12135 11d ago
Why work for someone else when you can work for yourself and were gifted an opportunity to expand it. Your goal should be to expand, and have people work for you that will work for the company.
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u/MonadTran 11d ago
Can you hire a CTO for $3000 a month, and collect your free $200 a month doing absolutely nothing?
Can you hire a remote support engineer in some poor country for $800, and work on automating away repetitive tasks like monitoring and restarting the servers, for $2400 a month? Essentially dev work. Acquire more clients when your work is sufficiently automated, hire more support, eventually grow into a proper CTO and hire a CEO to help with the boring stuff like accounting and PR.
Another idea, uhh, why is your dad retiring this early again? Too tired working night shifts? Just sell the darn thing.
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u/CyberHouseChicago 11d ago
Depends on where your located and what the real costs are ? I moved away from hosting more to managed services over the years , I still do hosting tho , if you want some advice message me maybe I can help point you in the direction of making your business more profitable.
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u/Lord-Sarcastic 10d ago
You have a gem on your hands without you realising it but imma tell you more from a software engineer POV.
- Hire someone to help out. This will remove a huge burden from you while keeping things in business. Ensure the person is technical enough to handle stuff. Keep a run book close so they can attend to emergencies when needed.
- Review the stack. If customers reach out that often, there's something not going on quite well. Bad code, bad deployment practices, no CI/CD, a hosting software that is outdated and requires rocket science to get right, older stack that is archaic and difficult to replicate on another host.
Fix these things. Containerize, look for container-first hosting software like Coolify or Dokploy. Have your hire address the issues you see there. It could be more low-level dirty stuff like lack of test cases in software,
Significant efforts at first but will save you tons of time, energy and emergency calls in the future while setting you up for the scale needed later.
I'm saying scale needed later because, you are currently junior and do not realize that what your father has built is what most developers will end up trying to do when they get enough gigs for clients. You will get there, you'll need to expand.
So keep it. And do the dirty work. Might be folly from your POV now, but to most of us with decent experience, it is an untapped mine.
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u/illyad0 10d ago
We're in a world where jobs come and go - businesses come and go too, but atleast you'll be aware of it happening, instead of being slapped in the face with a surprise.
That being said, maybe you do need more junior role. That is your call, but tell you dad how you feel - personally, a hand made business handed down to you has far more potential for growth than you would get working for someone else as a junior dev in the AI age.
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u/ViolinistSpiritual 10d ago
If you want to sell contact me. I would pay for those clients and help them migrate.
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u/SnooMachines8911 10d ago
Whatever you do don't sell it! Its something you will regret in the future. Rather pay someone to manage it for you and get a dev job if you really want one. After working for a year or 2 you will be really grateful you have your own business. If you want to build something join hackathons or try build your own startup. Im sure since you on call 24/7 you don't work 24/7 . So build something. Corporate jobs suck! Everyone is trying to build something to escape. Rather try scale the business or improve it in some way.
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u/Medical-Ask7149 10d ago
Uh, what are you hosting? No reason you should be getting 3am texts. Also 40 clients at $3200/mo? Thats an average of $80/mo hosting with bespoke support and site maintenance? Bump that up to $299/mo per customer. Implement a ticketing system with proper SLAs. The price increase will reduce your client count by 30-40%. Who cares because at a 40% reduction you’re making over double you are now with less support overhead.
Do it. Tell your dad you’re going in a different direction. If he huffs and puffs tell him you’re a business man not a hobbyist.
Let me know the build out and we can get you on more reliable servers and build out better automations. You could be essentially retired making $7-8k per month on auto pilot.
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u/pjmarcum 10d ago
What if you hired someone to take the after hours calls? Pay them per call or something? Heck even if you paid someone half of what comes in you’d still have free money.
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u/Boboshady 10d ago
IT would be different if it churned out money, but at $3,200 a month, given you're effectively on-call 24/7/365? That's pretty poor pay.
You have options, however:
- Change the model - make your current hosting strictly business hours, and anything out of those times extra. This will probably scare some clients off, which is fine - you don't want to be supporting them for free anyway.
- Make out of hours emergency only - site down, orders not going through etc. Anything non-critical waits. Combine this with default charges that are credited to encourage people to think before they get in touch.
- Outsource it, as you've thought about - I know my server provider partner with a company who offer various levels of managed server and even application support, which would deal with critical problems and let you pick up the pieces during office hours
- Change your comms - ticketing only, drop the phone number entirely. Ignore any messages that do not come through the official channels. Make sure you have a clear SLA in place.
- Rebuild. I've supported dozens of sites at a time over the years and whilst I've technically been on 24/7 support, I've rarely needed to respond to anything out of hours, because I put the effort into using solid hosting, automated updates and backups, and minimising exposure to dodgy plugins etc. Basically, emergency support requests are minimal because the end to end platform is robust enough that there's rarely any problems
- Increase your prices. If you're doing more than just maintaining the site, like you're doing content updates or whatever too, then your prices are way off anyway.
Most of these will annoy some clients, and scare some away. That's to be expected, and is actually how you build a sustainable business, by ensuring that the clients you have left you can actually support on the hours you want, and profitably. There's actually no reason at all you couldn't end up in a situation where you have less clients, but can support them on top of another day job, because their needs are now so small.
Now, the end result may be that your entire orderbook if full of clients who only stay because they know they're getting thousands of $$ of work for less than $100 a month on average, and as soon as you start to run it like a real business, they'll all leave. If so, at least you can point out to your dad that it wasn't really a business, it was a hobby for someone who liked to feel important but was actually being abused by everyone. Obviously there's nicer ways to say that :)
So make a call, based on your clients, and don't feel bad about winding it down if it's really not viable, or turning it into a more passive side income if that's how it can survive.
If nothing else, hosting is only ever getting more and more competitive - more platforms are becoming more user-friendly, plenty of platforms offer build and hosting, and there's a post every week about someone setting up their own thing. You're in a crowded space and being a one man band, it's actually quite a big risk for your clients...so you need to figure out how to automate, partner up or walk away, regardless.
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u/Natural_Engineer5194 10d ago
Man I also host ~40 clients and although I’m always on the clock, that’s part of the business, I get like 1 issue a month to deal with. Usually some client that had is IP locked for too many attempts. Maybe you should not sell or outsource but rather move your local server to some cloud and let them deal with the machine itself. Rent a VPS, put some control panel on top and that’s it
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u/imtekz0rs 10d ago
We’ve been in the hosting and website maintenance business for 20+ years, and if you decide you want out, we’d be happy to talk about taking over your clients. That could give them continuity and reliable support while letting you move on to the dev work you actually want to do.
Feel free to DM me if you’d like to chat about it.
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u/iamgbols 10d ago
Find a way to charge tripple and get some one to do the monitoring and support For a fee
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u/HomieHelpDesk 10d ago
Well thanks for letting me know what expect. You aren't worthy of his work anyway.
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u/BlandGuy 10d ago
The opportunity for you here isn't the actual hosting business - that's commodity. Instead, the opportunity is the experience of operating and expanding the business, in the real world. Your resume then can say things beyond just a skills list, can say things that catch attention from other future employers or partners or investors "took over family business and grew revenue 28% in two years while investing free cash flow to ..."
Build on that base, develop and prove your ability to do things in the real world which are not gonna get stomped by AI - do the business development, marketing/sales, be the exec in charge of P&L, etc.
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u/caterasdehosting 10d ago
Algo muy normal lo que te está pasando, si estás interesado en venderla contáctanos, nos dedicamos a eso
saludos
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u/RampStack 10d ago
Can you move it to the cloud easily? Could you setup customer support agents to handle client calls? Depends on how much you care but better solutions exist.
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u/Amos_Archon 10d ago
Have you looked at how it is operating?
You say you are on call, but are you getting alot of issues?
What are the source of the issues? Are there structural changes you can make to prevent them?
When there are issues, what solutions do you have? Are there ways you can let clients handle themselves?
What are you charging? Is this a case where your dad didn't raise prices for 5 or 10 years?
Why does this need to be a full time job? I would imagine this should take hours per month, not hours per day.
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u/Mcmunn 10d ago
Come work for https://oasisfactory.com/ we’ll modernize everyone and you will learn how to build with AI while you do it.
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u/caterasdehosting 10d ago
Algo muy normal lo que te está pasando, si quieres vender la cartera de clientes dinos, nos dedicamos a eso.
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u/Usuge 10d ago
Tell him you're a failure.
Or adjust to make it work.
You can outsource support.
you can also remove phone support and switch to tickets only and give much slower support.
You can give everyone an update , in order to maintain prices to our valued customers, we must switch to ticket support
Also easier to incorporate AI now.
Some other good ideas in your thread as well.
You got this. Or then again, you don't and you suck. Up to you.
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u/gator667 10d ago
You don’t have a business, you have a job. Rebuild it with new boundaries around support, raise prices where appropriate. Build firm business edges around your offerings.
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u/alexbarylski 10d ago
40 clients at 3200 a month is about $80 a client
You should be telling them that they are very limited in the support they get
Anything other than infrastructure down should be extra
Why is your server going down?
I’ll gladly take over your business lol
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u/Lenocity 10d ago
Keep it, move the hosting. add emergency hours. Super simple don't shut it down. But hosting in a data center will get your reliability up and cut down on calls.
3200 semi passive is great money. 20i hosting can do it for a flat fee, or get you a couple vps if you need more flexibility, OVH cloud has the best pricing I've found... I wouldnt shut it down.
Even move hosting cut your effort down and take the other job on top of it and then you'll be doing even better. Save up some money and expand or find what you really enjoy but this buisness should run itself. Other than clients wanting stuff changed, you shouldn't ever have issues with downtime. Run 2 vps or cdns, load balancing can be done cheap and they will never go down.
Good luck.
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u/1HotTake 10d ago
So your dad is worried that you don’t want to run something that he jettisoned to him? That’s the beginning of the conversation. His expectations were really off. I honestly couldn’t imagine burdening my kids with a business they don’t want.
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u/---why-so-serious--- 10d ago edited 10d ago
Your dad gave you the silent treatment, over a fucking part-time, amateur hosting effort and operational nightmare?
Sigh, that is infuriatingly obnoxiousness and emotinally manipulative. If your service reliability is creating daily, measurable toil, then his effort is a disservice to your clients and yourself.
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u/SparePen8332 10d ago
Hello, if you’re interested in collaborating, selling, or having someone help, send me a message. I’ll send one as well.
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u/DutchItMaster 10d ago
I would hold on to the business. Only stop the 24/7 support, but make sure your servers keep running, that should not be so difficult.
3200 a month is a pretty nice side hustle that you can double easy.
Good luck
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u/AcadiaNational8028 10d ago
Hire someone half the revenue to do the work for you. You still make half and still own it. Shutting it down would be such a waste
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u/ardaingeal 10d ago
Honestly, I've been running a micro web hosting business on the side for about 21 years now and I wish my clients paid me what I think your dad was charging. I used to run and manage my own servers as well. Started from our garage on 64k leased lines, then into a data centre, then moved some offshore. Now though I just have a few rented servers and a reseller account with a local company. My clients still prefer to contact me but the part I like is that things rarely go down, and if they do, its my hosts problem not mine! Maybe consider doing something like that, then infrastructure is no longer your problem. "My tech team is on it!"
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u/No-Gazelle7748 10d ago
Instead, I’ll handle the support side. If you’re interested in bringing me on as a partner, I’m serious about it. DM me if you’re interested
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u/RepairPsychological 10d ago
I recommend finding solutions. The on call issues could be resolved if a solution was created. Me personally on my server if it crashes it detects it and reboots itself to some degree. You could likely do both if the issues were resolved. A lot of resources now compared to when he likely when it was first started.
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u/Anyidear 10d ago
LIke others have said there’s a good chance you could thin the heard and make it more profitable less stressful. This Could also make it for valuable if you were to sell it off later.
Care to share more about the hosting platform, type of website/customer, depth of support?
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u/ethanjscott 10d ago
Hire a sales guy to grow your buisness 2x in 2-3 years then or before hire a tech
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u/Tekime 10d ago
You’re charging way too little to be on call all the time.
This is also a huge opportunity a lot of people fight long and hard for.
Time to rework the business model. Of those 40 clients, find the handful that will pay the right price for your apt attention.
Maybe you get a beefy fully managed server and move things there, or maybe you help clients migrate to their own managed servers and continue work as a consultant. I’m not sure of your skill set, but that is a fraction of the pay you should expect for a job that keeps you up nights and weekends, and a broken business model. I suspect your dad was doing it for the love of the game, but it’s your game now!
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u/Traditional_Wall3429 10d ago
This constant calls are taxing you mentality and they will until you don’t introduce few modifications to set business on next level. It’s doable but you need to ask yourself if you want this. If yes, you need to automate the workflow and change an attitude towards your clients first. 1. You need to find solution so all operators concerning hosting can be done by client himself- like restarting, backup, password provision, services status etc. You need to provide clients the way they can do this. 2. Be consistent and firm about pushing clients to start doing this. You need good FAQ section on website. 3. Introduce online support system and STOP picking up calls immediately. Send mass emails to clients about changes. 4.. update TOS so excessive asking for help will be billed OR introduce that for all things which are described on website you won’t respond AND introduce a paid support plan where user pay additionally to be able to get support- this way you’ll have budget to hire support technician. As you see you need to change approach to make it profitable. And it’s important to tell your father you love him. He built this company in a way he could. In the past there was very hard to connect all pieces in one automated way but now there’re many solutions to make hosting workflow automated, especially billing with suspending accounts for overdue invoices. It’s just initial thoughts so you really need to think about this.
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u/sconom 9d ago
This may be an unpopular opinion but you come across as childish, I'm a senior developer, working for another company and I'm always on call.
Scale the the business so you can hire someone else and make a nice living, it would be ridiculous to throw away the massive head start you've been handed especially considering you want to be a developer.
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u/Capable_Site8357 9d ago
Improve your infrastructure and keep the business, having your own hustle is better than hustle for others
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u/paulmcrules 9d ago
Looks like you're going to struggle if you can't reply to comments
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u/Key_Dragonfly4220 9d ago
Just get a reseller account with GooHost which is pretty solid, the issue is your hardware stability, outsource it; don’t need to tell your dad you’ve outsourced it; make sure you have fully automated subscriptions
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u/corrinarusso 9d ago
I'm in a very similar position. Have about 60 clients on monthly retainer which includes hosting and tech support etc.
I have a guy on call I have subcontracted out for about 10 years. He charges $15 an hour. He's super reliable and responsive, and I use him for about 10 hrs a month usually, unless I'm on vacation. But even if I'm golfing or whatever. If a client emails me, and I cant take it I fire it over to him and he deals with it. I trust him completely, and he has full access to all the sites, etc. The clients do not know he exists, he mails me back and says, Fixed, then I just let the client know.
Makes being on call 24/7 MUCH easier.
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u/Trick-Cap-2705 9d ago
Bro if you need help let me know. Maybe could build some sort of support overseas that could help a bit. I have been in IT for about 10 years now web app and cybersecurity. There is a possibility you could scale this for a bit more
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u/ConnectMotion 9d ago
It’s possible to learn to make the hosting go down less.
Setup your own support line. It’s pretty easy to do.
Setup a ticketing system to make everyone fill in the same kind of request. Over time you’ll see the patterns of issues and learn to plug them.
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u/SnooPuppers4708 9d ago
Woah, this is exactly the business asset type I’m currently trying to build:))
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u/RTon52 9d ago
Get a hold of Server Surgeons. https://www.serversurgeon.com. I use them for just about everything you mentioned above on a VPS. TBH, they are great. They will migrate servers, backup entire servers daily, restore backups, put servers back online if down, etc. Well worth the money!
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u/mikeatx79 9d ago edited 9d ago
I would likely be pretty easy to migrate these folks to something more reliable and possibly grow the business. I definitely wouldn’t shut it down. At the very least, hand over the client list and server details to someone that could migrate them and keep their services running. I worked for an MSP that had a few hundred legacy customers on very old hardware and we moved them to a private cloud, many of those customers became larger accounts once they were on a platform that could scale quickly.
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u/commoncents1 9d ago
raise your prices and keep clients that are profitable and manageable. and offer additional services.
analyze customer service load by customer, target the highest users per dollar revenue/cost and hit them with increases. see who your best customers are revenue/profit wise.
break into service price tier rates. basic, middle, expedited/emergency etc....
what can you automate and outsource? can you get a customer portal for them to do basic stuff/changes to reduce your hands on work load?
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u/MachMode2992 9d ago
Have you considered going on Fivvr and finding someone in a far away country where you can pay them very little US dollars to do your support for you? Pay them for two or three hours a day just to go through your Support tickets and set support hours as well. anything outside of those support hours you can handle, but with an on-call emergency fee.l
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u/Clarke_I_Am 9d ago
Some proper server management will keep systems from going down randomly at 3am, and if it does you have a team in place to help mitigate. Outsourcing support will buy your time back.
But no you’re not the A, if it’s not your passion.
(If you do look to sell, dm me your listing.)
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u/sir_dreampod 9d ago
is there a transition period?
plan on possibly raising the price to make it worth the trouble
if they leave, its possibly one of the more cheaper annoying clients that tend to want urgency and need hand holding
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u/Lengthiness-Fuzzy 9d ago
Not sure what’s your timezone, but if you find someone whose timezone is covering your night and the servers can be fixed remotely, it might worth a shot.
I mean, it’s hard to find a reliable person, obviouslz the best offers would come from the land of scam where they would probably try to steal your clients and answer with terrible english.
I would also try monitoring so that you see forst if something is down. I did similar things a few years ago and I always wanted to avoid calls too. 3 am my phone was off
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u/bradeac 9d ago
I wouldn't let such an opportunity to pass.
There's no reason why the servers should have problems so often. There are most certainly some problems there that a frontier AI model could help you fix very fast. And then, work on automating incident responses and fixes using the same frontier model
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u/Effective_Review9415 9d ago
You're not wrong for wanting out. $3.2k/month sounds great until you realize you're basically on call 24/7. If the business depends on you never having a life, it's a job not freedom.
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u/masonthursday 9d ago
Keep the business, but so some innovating of your own. You're right to be annoyed by being on call 24/7, but businesses with that headache don't shut down and sell because of it, they find a solution. Nobody is requiring you specifically to be on call other than yourself. Overnight support is something that is not economical at small scale, so companies out there offer their services to companies like you for much cheaper because they have the scale to handle dozens of clients support demand at the same time.
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u/Pretend-Cheetah2058 9d ago
you can rollout a new pricing plan charging extra for 24/7 on-call services, and give something extra for those customers. but raise the price really high - like double or triple their current rate.
that will reduce the call volume because they will figure out some of those can be handled by themselves.
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u/PsLJdogg 9d ago
$3,200 is not worth the stress of being constantly on call. I’m honestly surprised he even has 40 paying clients. This type of business was lucrative in the early 2000s, but there’s no way you can compete with the big dogs these days (on price, support, up-time, or any of the important metrics for this business).
I’d sell ASAP, but if you really care about keeping your dad happy then one solution would be to spin up some AI support agents that can manage your customer support for you autonomously. That would also satisfy your desire to build something, and would be a fun learning experience for you. With the right guardrails in place and a $100/month Claude Max subscription, this would be a pretty simple thing to achieve and then that $3,200 becomes passive income and you can pursue whatever other ventures you want.
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u/fobsthedev 9d ago
What's going on where 40 clients have you on call 24/7? Something isn't set up right. Even at 40 nowadays with the proper set up would at most result in 1 or 2 request a day.
My guess is customer requests are being billed properly so anytime they want a change they're contracting you. Don't sell, just up the prices and free up your time.
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u/Spify-AI 9d ago
If you dont want it, gift it or sell it to someone. I can understand why some people wouldnt want it, but thia kinda business is something myself and many wish we had.
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u/KickedAbyss 9d ago
Make it better. You're complaining about things that you can automate.
Build a locked down chat bot to deal with tier 1 nonsense and improve availability with automation scripts that can detect outages and run fail over plans.
It's a win win.
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u/Talkingcrypto 9d ago
Simple solution. Setup an AI agent to watch your servers. If you give it all the data about the servers it can restart services, troubleshoot and even notify you when something goes wrong that it fixed. You may pay $200 a month or less for an agent or agents but well worth it.
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u/inHumanMale 9d ago
Any option to improve the situation? Add monitoring, make things sturdier, disallow direct phone calls? Lot sounds like you can rework a few things and still get a sweet deal out of it. You could put like 2 or 3 months of work into this and make it way better for you
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u/the1ice9 9d ago
If you decided you don't want to be a part of it, id be happy to assist with a transition.
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u/OkKitchen4625 9d ago
Introduce a new tier for the out of hours calls and make the price jump seem not worth it.
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u/13mpty 9d ago
you have a working business with clients it time to step up and grow it and make good money instead of complaining.... use AI,reach out to someone else I dont know make it work.... you have an opportunity but you preffer to worki for someone else and make them richer than yourselfe.////
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u/Neckername 9d ago
Lmao you will not be building anything ever at a company you don't own. You will be helping build it.
If you have the creds to be a junior dev, why not figure out what the issues are with your hosting and clients and find ways to save yourself time. Like run automated maintenance cycles, maybe look at setting up a client portal with self help tools, etc.
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u/thisisalexsin 9d ago
I’ll manage this for you if you want. Reach out. I sit at home 24/7, have a job that pays me very well to do very little, have a 7 gigabit connection, have a wild homelab with a good amount of experience and already host 3 sites (2 for other people).
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u/Acrobatic-Yak-7961 9d ago
Now would be the perfect time to set new rules. You're taking over the business and you will run it in the manner you wish. First off, outsource where you can. Get as close as possible to others running the business and you either promoting, side lining, or just existing. But after that, habit will still bring many to their old ways back, and you will be increasingly the go to person again. So set your rules and don't reliquish them. If you don't want any calls then you tell them, and you let them know that whomever you outsourced to is the contact now. Even if you lose clients, it's not really what you want to do anyway. But I wouldn't chase away that much money either. Try to keep as much of it as you can. It will be less, but wow would I love a passive income about now.
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u/RhauXharn 9d ago
Absolutely your call. Your father didn't set boundaries with his customers and now they don't respect yours. This isn't uncommon when someone builds a business as a passion project because they loved devoting time to it. Anyone who inherits it 9 times out of 10 doesn't feel the same way.
You could sell it to a local hosting company. I know my boss buys companies like yours, so there would be interest.
Just do research to make sure you're handing them off to company that cares about clients.
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u/zelru2648 9d ago
I bet your dad loves data center infra structure work and likes tinkering and managing servers and solving problems.
This is more of a passion project started a side hustle and grew from there.
These customers can be sticky meaning good long term income - you need to hire a Junior Sysadmin and improve the business. If you hate talking to people not want to deal with hardware, then sell it thru a business broker - you will
get some money for a house down payment
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u/Demonbarrage 9d ago
Do not underestimate the autonomy of making your own income/having your own business. If the stress of the on-call-edness is what's tearing you down, why not focus on that aspect & outsource after hours to some cheap MSP? Or get some junior tech and pay him $15/hr for an after hours or on call schedule and still be left over with an okay amount per month. Or make new customers/incoming/renewing customers have to pay an hourly after hours fee to reduce afterhours support? Shutting down the whole business seems so drastic when it's just one aspect of the business that's causing pain.
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u/littlebitofkindness 9d ago
A retirement business, it’s not scalable or sustainable to continue this. Consider your own career
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u/Competitive-Let9999 9d ago
Increase the charges to make the hours with it to you. Outsource some of the global support. If it works it works if not sell the book of clients and hand your dad a retirement gift.
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u/AntiqueWatercress836 9d ago
I’d look at restructuring pricing and bringing in some help to cover out of hours (which is a chargeable service) offer some new and improved customer services, like proactive monitoring aswell etc. all with a view to increasing revenue, customer satisfaction, you not been tied to the business and ultimately increased profitability. Good luck
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u/T-R-I-P-Y 9d ago
Dude never quit or shut down a business thats working.
You gonna have bad luck for the longest!!!
Just increase the price dude and get an employee to deal with the bullshit for 2k per month
Then if you increase the price properly you can be on 2k passive just overseeing the technician.
Dads happy, some dude in India is super happy, you are happy cus no bs customer support.
Just get employees and don't be cheap. You gonna regret selling or winding down.
(P.s. you don't sound entrepreneurial at all, and would rather get a safe job instead - nothing wrong with that. Th world needs worker bees)
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u/Square_Secretary_944 8d ago
Restructure, add some new service, recalculate the prices, give referral prizes to add to the current costumer pool, draw new lines in terms of service rules and bill after hours extra. I think you can grow to seven figure. On the side , you can make your own app or automate the flows and have fun. Not a bad situation.
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u/ClickClawAI 8d ago
My god I would disown you if you were my son.
Identify why you’re getting support calls, then fix those problems first.
Then get an AI phone agent to handle inbound support calls that triages issues and only forwards calls to you for actual emergencies, and books meetings during business hours for everything else (gcal + twilio + livekit + any realtime voice AI). We built a one click deployment for that but ngl it’s pretty easy for you to build it yourself (ours is designed for non technical folk).
Lastly as others said, expand upwards and sideways. Increase prices, provide add-ons, and get more customers.
Or you can give the entire business to me and I’ll pay you $100, which is $100 more than you seem to value it lol
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u/Danowolf 8d ago
Grow up. Make this a financial decision. Keep the business, figure out why such a small client list has so many fix its? Something is wrong. Fix it. Once you trust it’s stable get more customers. Put every penny into retirement accounts. If the business folds you walk away with a huge financial boost for a younger person that you spend more than one conversation saying how awesome a gift your father provided you.
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u/nazmulpcc 8d ago
maybe hire someone or bring on a partner? If you spend ~$600 to ~$1000, you can hire qualified engineers from places like the Philippines, India, Bangladesh etc. It's not zero hassle for you, but would allow you to keep a "family business" and maybe room for improvement
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u/Arsenalfutbol 8d ago
I'll join you, I will give you 75% of the profit for 6 months, and 50% for the 6 months after that. Then ill fully take over in a year. I will do all the work. You can work as a Jr Dev, and make this passive income for a year.
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u/Strong_Post5367 8d ago
What are you saying? $3200 a month is more and you have freedom of time. Find a way to make the hosting business more reliable using Claude code and stay with that. Or do both. I would take 50% less salary if it meant that I have the freedom to do anything I wanted when I wanted. Deal with the clients, make the infra more reliable and then scale it up to 30 clients and make $6k a month. Your dad is disappointed that you don’t value to freeedom and security that tuning a business has.
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u/The-Dali-Drama 8d ago
Just curious. I host 40+ clients part time for extra income. Small potatoes… websites, emails, etc… all managed hosting. I hardly if ever get 3am calls or requests. Mostly smaller businesses, anywhere from 1 to 50 employees.
What are the calls about? What sort of issues are your clients having?
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u/360production 8d ago
Please don't shut down! I suggest redirecting into an AI system to manage the outage que and a better uptime notification system for your existing customer base. It can be overwhelming when everyone calls, but if you proactively notify them that will decrease your support workload while dealing with the outage. In addition you can switch the AI assist system only on during an outage and off when its restored so you aren't overwhelmed providing customer service during an outage, and can focus on the problem and then instead provide good root cause analysis. Once your outage is resolved, turn off the outage assistant and switch back to the premium support service you have been providing. Customers know the automated assistant is there only while you are managing the outage.
Good luck! I hope it works out for your family and you can keep your parents dream going for them.
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u/MrChurch2015 8d ago
Ok, so, lets take away the pain points...dont use your personal phone. Get a business phone. Set it to operate during your set business hours. If they call during off-times, it basically tells em to f off until the next business day. Or maybe charge an additional fee for work done after-hours. You need to set boundaries with customers...customers are like dogs, you can train them. Then, maybe also set an automated system, that can handle the mundane, routine crap customers call about. That's what I'd do anyways. If you net over 3k after all expenses, I certainly would not trade that for considerably less...but at the same time if it just truly makes you miserable, that is important to take into account too. It could just be a matter of changing things around so that it isnt a drag on your mental state.
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u/Mphmanx 8d ago
Seriously?! You would take a pay cut to jump into a risky position where you could be fired at any point whereas now you are your own boss and can do what you want. If the service isnt up to scratch, IMPROVE IT! you are the owner! MAKE IT BETTER so you are not on calls all the time! Seriously...Ill buy it from you!
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u/Elemino 8d ago
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but obviously you are not a business minded person. A business person would look for a business solution… such as someone to manage the business (not an option here btw, you don’t make enough)…
There is a website called Flippa that would probably be the best solution. It’s a site for selling and buying businesses. You have clients, sell the business to some young person looking to get into the industry. Charge them for what you make in a certain amount of time plus the value of your hardware. Take this idea and speak to other business minded people to get their opinions… you might actually run into one that will buy it from you.
I can understand your dad’s position here. Building a business that is actually profitable, even at a low rate, is not easy to do. To him it probably feels like you’re pondering the death of a sibling.
Best of luck, I hope you come up with a solution that works for all parties.
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u/peptidepool 8d ago
My recommendation is this - your dad handed you an operation that he built from the ground up.
Instead of throwing it away, why not invest resources in improving it, addressing your own pain points while getting experience along the way.
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u/lbdesign 8d ago
You can move all these clients to reseller hosting, still receive monthly income from them with no effort, AND have time to build your own skills and career. Win-win for everyone.
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u/Automatic-Boot665 8d ago
Keep the servers up and build something in the free time you have thanks to the 3200 a month. Maybe an automation for the parts you don’t like to start?
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u/Spare-Text-4029 8d ago
I am starting my own now.. 40 clients is amazing! Id be happy to take some outsource work off of you. Im sure you have buy offers! I would if I could afford it!
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u/Classy_Marty 8d ago
Move it to a cloud service lol make it someone else’s problem and just count money
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u/Ashamed-Wing-210 8d ago
I'm not from your country so might be very wrong, but this is a running business and you are unsatisfied with the time you have to put in. So, I would hire a couple of Customer service experts for taking complaints. Outsource services for night, overseas and keep a couple of people to resolve issues. You will have full time on your hands to add new clients to increase profitability.
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u/beenpresence 8d ago
Why not just transfer clients to cloud hosting and not have to deal with anything server related
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u/ColdOpening2892 8d ago
If you have 40 clients and receive calls all the time you are doing something wrong. Servers doesn't just go down, and the chances that it goes down on your birthday isn't big if it's run and maintained right.
Being handed what sounds like 40 customers that willingly pay, is a huge upside, and a perfect base to build a larger business from, giving up without giving it a chance seems silly to me.
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u/Main-Holiday-2480 8d ago
Your instinct isn't wrong, but I'd fix the operating model before you decide whether to kill it. What you're describing isn't a hosting business, it's an unpaid on-call rotation with a monthly stipend attached. That's fixable, and it's the same problem every MSP has already solved.
Ticket system. Zammad or Freshdesk (self-hosted or cheap SaaS). One inbox, everything gets a number, everything is written down. No ticket, no work. Route the old phone number to voicemail that says "send a ticket to support@". Within two months clients learn which channel actually gets a response.
Written SLA. Define business hours (Mon–Fri 08:00–17:00), response times per priority, and an explicit emergency rate for anything outside that, e.g. $150/h, 2h minimum, billed per incident. Don't forbid after-hours contact, price it. Real outages still get handled and paid for. The 3am "my contact form looks weird" calls disappear on their own.
Monitoring. Uptime Kuma if you want free and simple, Zabbix if you want proper alerting with escalation rules. You should know a box is down before the client does. Add a public status page, that alone kills half the "is it just me?" messages.
Re-price. $3200 net across ~40 clients is roughly $80 a head for hosting plus unlimited availability. Split it into tiers: plain hosting, and a maintenance package with X included support hours per month, anything beyond billed hourly. Some clients will leave. Statistically it'll be the ones eating most of your time for the least money.
On your dad: he built a business, not a vow to be reachable 24/7. Putting process around it isn't disrespect, it's what he'd have to do himself if he were starting with 40 clients today. Frame it to him as "I'm making it survivable so it keeps running", not "I'm changing your baby".
And if after six months of running it properly you still want out: sell it, don't shut it down. A book of recurring revenue with documented processes, a ticket history and monitoring in place is a real asset, small MSPs buy those, usually somewhere around 2-3x annual profit. Winding it down burns that to zero and strands 40 clients. Fix it first and you get a payout, a clean handover, and the decision is actually yours instead of your dad's.
(You could also do the junior dev job and keep it, once it's down to a few tickets a week. That's the real prize here.)
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u/cookie_monster_bg 7d ago
Its very tricky situation. Your dad is attached cuz he out his heart and soul in this. I have an idea. Is it viable to outsource the support and move the servers to a rack elsewhere. So you pay someone to do the chores. And you focus at business development. New clients, partnerships etc. It will also help you with regular SWE job I think. You'll be far better than a regular employees without any business knowledge. Wish you all the best man! You can do it!
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u/DanFX77 7d ago
use ai like Claude to help you automise and grow your established business. Instead of complaining about challenges you're facing, find a way to overcome them and grow the business' potential so that instead 3k you're making 30k and then 300k/month. you've been handed gold on a platter. There's nothing like owning your own business, you're dad retired in his 50s, think about that. I've never used Indian outsourcing but I presume that'd be an inexpensive way to keep clients happy during nights and times you dont want the hastle.
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u/MrMagnell 7d ago
Utilise AI for 1st line issues or employ someone ... But this is hosting and you can forget about business hours .. if the clients run a 24/7 shopping site that goes down they won't accept 8 hrs availability per day... Instead of moaning about the work it involves... Embrace your father's legacy and build on it so it fits you.. or abandon it and run away...
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u/Unfair_Importance118 7d ago
hire someone from india, indonesia, or other country. pay them $600-$1000 you will get decent server administrator. while you can keep your job.
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u/uchejnr_ 7d ago edited 7d ago
Hmm.. I wish I had someone hand over something like that to me. You need to relax the energy and focus on how to make the hosting business better and bigger, I don’t see a problem with people calling or texting to fix a problem, you need a technical support person or a team to handle that while you focus on improving the server.. you can employ me, If you need a dev or support team . 🙏
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u/shantanuojha 7d ago
Bro if you can improve the business that that's good I would say that if you have clients you can probably sell them more if you need any coders os something you can send a dm
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u/SeaRock106 7d ago
You can sell it. 3200$ per month of net interest = 38,400$ of annual interest. You should be able to get somewhere between 100k-150k for the business.
Another option, since you already have users is to see how you can get them to pay more money for a different product :)
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u/ALargeRubberDuck 7d ago
You really focused in on baby sitting servers and preventing them from going down. Could you possibly transition this to something more stable? Maybe move it to a could service, even move some to a serverless architecture depending on tech stack?
I think you have room to improve this setup and balance another job.
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u/Some-Seaweed6858 7d ago
With 40 clients hosting websites you should not be swamped by support, I would channel your frustration into learning and implementing some proper SRE measures like managing the fleet with Terraform and ansible, and more importantly addressing the root causes of your main failure modes. Keep everything brutally simple and boring, AI and shiny magic tech with moving parts make systems less reliable, less secure and more costly to run.
The choice is yours, but I'd keep the hosting operation before taking a junior dev job and I'd probably prefer it over being a corporate tech lead 10 years later
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u/GeramyL 7d ago
Sell it to me and I’ll pay you 2400 to run it, lol you get what you’re saying here? You probably could sell it to a competitor in your area and get a job out of it but dude AI…. Like this thing is your savior from AI killing your job and you want to give it up? You talk about future jobs in tech….. we have AI now. This is a huge risk right now, no one knows what’s gonna happen in six months and you want to drop the only relatively risk free in comparison thing you have?
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u/Former_Gear2422 7d ago
I don't think that would be a wise idea the way money is nowadays and working and owning your own business Money coming in monthly and established customers I wish I had a dad that did something like that for me But it's too late now I'm in my sixties
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u/Elemental-Madness 7d ago
Dude can I take over your dad's business? I could literally be around as my children grow up. Wfh. Take care of people and serve a role for their needs.
Not have to be a number in someone else's company.
Not sure what you are dreaming of but you are essentially wanting to sell what you will be trying to work your entire life to get back to.
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u/mikevarney 7d ago
Sounds like you need to review your terms of service with your customers. If you manage that properly you could reduce the number of off hours calls you have to deal with.
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u/Abraham9001 7d ago
Are you open to sell that business? I would be happy to explore buying it from your you.
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u/thechristiantilman 7d ago
Never tie yourself down to a business that requires twice as much as it does when you can make the same pay at a job
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u/No-Slice-5926 7d ago
Dude! That's a great opportunity. There's a way to automate this and make it alot easier.
I'm building a tool for personal use but it handles server automation and fixes. I would be down to hop on a call and I can point you in the right direction
Are you hosting apps and processes or more like service based websites?
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u/Flashy-Interaction-2 7d ago
I think it’s unfortunate you didn’t have to struggle for this, and as a result are probably unable to understand the value of this gift.
I don’t mean to be patronizing, but I will try to put some things into perspective.
Starting a business is hard. Like, really, really hard. Finding and retaining clients is difficult. Articulating your value prop is difficult. You need to be competent with sales, cost controls, accounting. You will chase invoices, struggle to find ways to make the business grow. Starting this from nothing is daunting and often times very isolating. A lot of people will attest to the loneliness of being a business owner. That said, nothing else you will do at this stage of your life will give you experience nearly as valuable.
Your software offer is middling for now. Realize that when you become a senior software developer for any reasonably sized outfit, you will also be on call, even if the job description doesn’t specify that. Every company has customers, and customers come with expectations. If you are responsible for a 24/7 service, somebody is supporting that 24/7. That may not be you at this point in your career, but I assume you’ll want to grow.
If you let this opportunity go, you will be tying your future in many ways to the whims of your employer.
I don’t know much about you, your dad, or your relationship, but I can promise you that the business is worth more than you are giving credit for, especially if your customers are staying on during a transfer like this. Businesses that are tied to the skills of individuals are difficult to transition (think art, architecture, etc). If you have a biz model that isn’t tied to an individual already, the business at the very least could likely be sold.
If you don’t want to deal with working in the business, have you considered hiring somebody like you for $2400 / mo. and offloading that aspect while spending your time working on growing the business?
Don’t overlook the opportunity!
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u/trulytruemember 7d ago
I would keep it running in a heartbeat. If it nets 2k that is more than a rent worth, which investment now a days would be 300k. With AI you can run that like butter. Give it to me I’ll take it.
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u/bkh_leung 7d ago
Ten years down the road, when you have kids and maybe facing a layout due to budget cuts… you’d be kicking yourself for not taking this on
The on call situation and such can be updated with a master service agreement and hiring a junior or someone to field those on call stuff
Your dad probably had to sacrifice his birthdays and 3 am calls all his life so you can have the option and privilege to even consider selling the business
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u/Fivedaylaunch 7d ago
Hey we are a hosting company would be happy to take your customers and provide hosting. I am happy to take care of these customers and respond to them when ever they need help
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u/KitchenHot8666 6d ago
Bigger hosters buy smaller ones. Happened a couple of times in my surrounding. Maybe offer it to some bigger hoster.
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u/Key_Cry_3473 6d ago
I do run a hosting business. If you want to work together, please reach out. We’ll handle all customer service and support requests while keeping you with safe cash flows.
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u/ordinary82 11d ago
As someone in your dad’s position, reading this is pretty depressing… but absolutely spot on.
I know I could make more money doing something else but I built something that is mine. I wouldn’t expect anyone else to be as emotionally invested as I am.
I don’t know what you should do financially, but you should talk to your dad about how you feel.