I’m sharing this for small business owners and solo entrepreneurs like myself who are thinking of launching a managed WordPress hosting business in 2023.

I had a rough experience with a billing panel yesterday, which led me to reassess my plans for launching a Managed WordPress Hosting business in 2023.

After thoroughly evaluating the risks (read to the end), I’m considering realigning my project and making it secondary to my main offer. I plan to focus on fixing people’s WordPress websites and selling plans with WordPress design and maintenance.

I will also offer WordPress hosting as an add-on, but only to selected clients.

This way, I won’t have to worry about auto-provisioning and the heavy features of WHMCS. I’ll need my lightweight Enhance control panel, and I’ll be good to go. I will provision things manually and sell my products using Stripe.

Note that I’m still in the pre-launch phase. My business plan is almost complete, and this is probably the last piece of it. Yes, I’ve learned never to launch any business without a written plan and all its financials. This exercise helps measure the risks.

When assessing the risks, I have identified the following challenges:

A highly competitive industry with over 500K WP-managed hosting providers
If you launch web hosting, it will be all about price positioning. The cheaper, the better the chances of success.
Even though WP users know about cloud hosting and its performance, most aren’t ready to pay the price. You need to find agencies and businesses. The approach is entirely different. You’ll need a sales team to build the relationship and market aggressively. This will take time.
Finding a competitive advantage against companies like rocket.net, Kinsta, and Cloudways is extremely difficult.
CloudFlare Enterprise has become an imbalanced selling point. Small companies can’t afford it.
Complexity (billing panel, provisioning, fraud, customer service…)
Web hosting is becoming a high-risk business for payment processors. It will hurt small businesses if they repeat what they’ve done with CBD.
No matter your ideas, you’re always limited by your control panels
If you want to sell performance, you can’t afford it on the cloud. It has to be bare metal.
You will spend your life creating/answering tickets for providers and clients.
Goodbye creativity. You can’t innovate or create anything in this space unless you are a skilled coder/developer.
Forget about paid traffic to bring in customers. In the best scenario, you can afford retargeting campaigns.
You won’t be able to grow without quite an extensive support team for WordPress.
Imagine if tomorrow CloudFlare allows WordPress hosting on their instances with Load-balancer, built-in CDN, etc...

Changing my primary product offering is changing my entire energy. I'm also off with the costs of infrastructures (approx. 10K/year in my original plan with two DC and quite a few servers leveraging the potential of Enhance), off with my delusional dreams (building up a Lego like a 5yo kid), I don’t need WHMCS anymore, and I don’t need to stress out and depend on other people's will to upgrade or launch new features.

If I succeed in phase one, I can always re-adjust and scale the hosting side if I see some demand. By then, Enhance will have become a Ferrari.

I hope sharing a bit of my journey and business plan can help other solopreneurs.

Please feel free to comment and share your owner experience/adventure ;-) Best, Adrien

PS: Thank you, Adam, for your time in helping me use and learn Enhance. I've rarely come across anyone as supportive and professional as you. I would have probably dropped the web hosting service if Enhance wasn't there today.