Every web designer or developer usually considers offering web hosting services as a complimentary service that fits well with their design services.  My company offered web hosting services for the past 5 years, but we limited it to only customers that we did design work for.

The recurring revenue from web hosting helped my company get started, but it also got to a point to where the amount of hosting revenue that I had coming in each year was less than the amount of money it took to keep the web servers running each year.   A lot of that had to do with the fact that I owned so many domain names of my own that I needed multiple servers to support my own company’s websites as well as to support the hosting division of my company.  When I first started out, everything ran fine with my own websites sharing the same server as my customer websites.

Another thing to consider is the support that you must offer to customers that are hosting with you.  For instance:

•    Email issues including SPAM or missed emails
•    Website downtime if anything goes wrong with your server
•    General computer support as many customers will ask you for help with whatever computer issue they may be having at the time
•    Hacker issues

There are things that come up when you are web host that you would never dream of happening.  The ultimate nightmare, which I have experienced a few times is waking up one morning, knowing that you have a lot of projects on the table and finding your hosting server dead in the water.   The phone will be ringing off the hook and you realize that your day will consist of ordering a new server and moving a hundred websites as quick as you can.

One other thing to consider about offering web hosting is that it is nearly impossible in today’s time to compete on price with the larger hosts out there.  The only way to compete is offering better services than a lot of the bigger hosts, and even that is hard to do when a lot of the bigger companies have large support staffs.

I knew that one of the main changes I needed to make to my company was moving away from web hosting.   How would I do this?  This was the problem I ran into.  When you have customers mostly paying by the year, and at different random months of the year depending on the customer billing cycle, there is no easy way to move away from web hosting.

When you have an internet store or even a brick & mortar business and want to shut it down, basically you close the doors or cancel the domain and take the loss yourself as an owner.  When you are running a web hosting company, all of your customers are relying on you so you can’t just shut it off.  Whatever move I was going to make, the most important thing would be that the customers would see very little downtime, and their future services would be up to the standards that I had provided with my company.

After exploring some options, my friend and server admin decided to take over my hosting customers under his new company of MatrixEast.com.  This worked well since this was someone who I trusted to give the same level of support that I gave to my customers.

Its only fitting though that once we agreed on this and decided to make this change in early January, my main hosting server decided to crash the week before Christmas!!!  While everyone was out doing their last minute shopping, my friend & I were moving websites and trying to fix any issues we found.

It was almost like my server was saying to me “You are not getting out of this so easily”.

About a year ago, I started to realize that I was spreading myself way too thin in trying to build my business up to achieve its maximum potential.  No matter how driven you are to succeed, you must always make time for yourself and take the time to “stop and smell the coffee”.  Without doing so you are hurting yourself and your business if you do not take time to realize what parts of your business are profitable and what parts are not.  You are also hurting your own personal health as you never have any downtime.

The life of an entrepreneur & freelancer is not a 9-5 type of job, instead it is a 24 hour type of job.  There are no definite work hours, but it seems there is always work to be done and never enough time in a day to get that work done.

For the last 4 years or more, I took very little downtime as I was focused on keeping my customers happy and building up a profitable business.  I also had basically given up playing music as I felt at the time, that the business was more important.

At this time last year, my company was based on:

•    Providing web hosting services & support for local clients in the NC area
•    Providing web design & consulting services to a range of clients throughout the United States
•    Managing multiple websites for 2 separate large internet retail companies
•    Owning, operating & continually updating an affiliate based network of over 100 niche internet stores
•    Operating as a merchant with a network of internet retail stores selling novelties & other products
•    Partnership in a new domain monetization startup company which would build niche websites on premium domains in exchange for a cut of the profits

EastWave has always run a very small staff in our main office in North Carolina.  All development work for customers is handled in our NC office as well as all order processing for any of the products purchased on the web stores that we own.

I think there have been a few development customers that would come to us thinking that we were a large company with many developers.  The truth is, almost 100% of any new development on websites either for customers or for our own interests was completed by me personally.

There have been numerous days to where I would work at the computer for 20 hours at a time, sleep a few hours and get back to work and put in another 20 hour day.

I knew that I had to make a change, but I wasn’t quite sure what that change would be.

Many changes are happening at EastWave, and I felt it was important to put my new blog online first to let everyone know what is going on in my world and throughout all the entities that I own.

So let’s begin with an introduction to my life, and how I got to where I am today…

Throughout high school, all I wanted to be was a rock star.  I played in quite a few different bands in those days, which saw limited success.  In various bands throughout my life, I have played either guitar, bass or handled the lead vocals.  I can also play drums to a certain extent, but I wouldn’t consider myself a drummer.

My parents were determined that I needed to go to college, and of course I didn’t really think I needed a college education to play music so I wasn’t really sure what to do.  On the last day of summer break after my high school graduation in 1992, I went to Wilson Technical Community College to enroll in SOMETHING since my mother had given me the choice of getting a job or going to school.  I decided to take Automotive Technology since fast cars was another of my longtime passions.  This worked out pretty well since I had the chance to work on my 280ZX anytime I wanted and I even ended up with a full scholarship to the automotive program since my grades were so good.  Some may consider that a smart, educated rock n’ roller to be an anomaly in this world, but my whole life has been different from the normal life that 99% of people in this world live.

After graduating from the Automotive Technology program, I went on to take the college transfer program at WTCC and transferred to East Carolina University in Greenville, NC.  Once again I had a dilemma since it was the last day of registration and I still had not chosen a major, since I still didn’t have a clue of what I wanted to do other than play music.  I was looking at the programs and the Communications - Media Production program sounded interesting so I just chose that as my major with Business Administration as a minor.  Keep in mind, this was totally off the cuff without even investigating the details of the program.   Once classes started in my major, I realized that the Communications program was filled with scholarship football & basketball players.  What a lucky pick for a major!!!  I pretty much breezed through the college courses and ended up graduating from ECU in 1997.

The day I graduated from college was pretty special since my band at the time had our first show as well on that evening at a bar in Wilson, NC.   The band at the time didn’t last very long after that, but something I learned during that time would have a MAJOR impact on my future career, the skill of website design.

I learned website design through trial and error, starting with a blank canvas in an image program and just created what would become a website.  I have never read any books on computers, or even taken any computer classes in college.  Back when I was in college, the students didn’t even have a college email address and the Internet was in its early stages of development.

From those early beginnings, I went on to work for a little over a year at a printshop in which I learned the skill of sign design & vinyl lettering.  I left the printshop to work for a web hosting company in Greenville NC in which greatly increased my web development skills as I was the primary web designer for over 4 years.

In late 2003, I started creating my own company and network of websites that would later become my EastWave Media network.  One thing led to another and I currently own over 100 developed internet properties.

I will be posting about various topics in this blog so please keep checking back.  This post is just a brief overview of what led me to creating EastWave Media.   I will go into more detail on previous periods in my life in future posts.

I will also be giving tips on internet marketing, web design, computers & much more so any of you out there interested in following a similar path should definitely bookmark my blog as there will be a lot of useful knowledge given out here.

Being an entrepreneur is not easy, so I will definitely be blogging about the ups and downs and pitfalls along the way…  Hopefully, some of my stories will help some of you in your own ventures.