Hi David(?)
Well, I guess I haven't put you off!
OK, if you're going to do it, then you need to get knowlegable about a
bunch of areas.
As far as ISP startup websites, I don't know of any off-hand, but a
couple of googles on "start ISP" etc should help you.
You also need to ensure that you (or someone you emply) has knowledge
in the following areas;
1) What services would an ISP offer (basic Internet connection, website
space, webmail, store-and-forward email, DNS services, etc)
2) You will need some hardware, so what are you going to provide that
is fault-tolerant?
3) What are the current, and potential-future, legal requirements for
data retention?
4) Based on 3), how much hardware/software, and what apps, will you
need to store your customers net history?
5) Which legal system will you be bound by, and (realistically!), how
will this be effected if the US or European justice system decides to
run roughshod over you?
6) What type of service will you offer (see point 1!) and what will you
contract / Service Level Agreement (SLA) be? This needs to be compared
to your competitors because if you are more expensive, and offer a
worse SLA, there is no reason to buy a service from you
7) To go way back to one of your original points, how are you going to
manage signon, authentication, etc? You are going to need some kind of
authentication system, plus the hardware to run it on.
8) Minor point (sarcasm!) - how are your customers going to connect to
you? They will have dialup modems, or ADSL modems, and need to dial
someone. Will you have a bank of modems, or will you buy an ADSL
concentrator? Remember that if you buy ten modems, then you need ten
phone lines (for which you are paying rental) to connect these to, and
you are limited to a maximum of ten customers connecting at once.
What if some of your customers decide to stay online for-virtual-ever?
That ties up a whole modem and phone line.
You can install ISDN and receive between 6 and thirty modem connections
on one connection (depending on *your* comms supplier) but this is
still a finite resource,
Maybe you can go with wifi, but then you are limited to a range of
~100m (how many prospective customers do you have within 100m?)
It's worth clarifying the position here; *you* are the Internet Service
Provider (ISP) so your customers have to connect to you via some kind
of comms line. If you can't resolve this point, then there is no point
in looking at the rest!
9) What software will you use for the "free" web service and email
service? There are some free systems available, such as the Apache
family, but you will still need to provide hardware and have someone
with the skills to administer it.
10) What skills will you employ to keep your customers data (web/email)
separate from each other. Imagine if customer A was able to view his
own website and then, by working up the directory structure, was able
to get into and modify Customer B's website...
11) How about Denial Of Service and Intrusion Detection (IDS)? You
should protect yourself from the Internet at large, and your own
customers, by employing hardware and software that will implement IDS /
DOS rejection.
12) What will connect all your lovely new computers together? You will
need some network switches which can be bought from a store for $50 but
there is a reason why we spend $12,000 on eac switch and go get the
training certification to manage them. How about security, system
isolation via VLANs, Quality of Service (QOS), monitoring, failover,
etc?
13) How tolerant will your systems be? You maybe host your major
systems on Apache, with a clustered mySQL database. What about the
customers? Will their websites be failed over when a switch or server
fails? This is extra hardware, software (maybe open-source, maybe
purchased), training, monitoring and general understanding.
14) When it all goes horribly wrong, who do your customers call? Do
they phone you at 0200 in the morning, you wake up and go "huh?", check
the systems and then respond "Darn - you're right, it's broken". Or do
you have a 24 hour staff who are monitoring the systems? Maybe the
fault-tolerance is so good that when there is a failure, then the
service automatically switches to the backup node and then sends a
message to your network monitoring team. They repair the failed unit,
and then switch the systems back to the original node.
Hey, David, I'm not *totally* trying to put you off. The entrepenurial
spirit should be encouraged but I want you to remember that the
*market* is mature; they expect an ISP to be cheap and to never fail.
This is a deep-pockets game but, if you are committed to trying it,
then my points above are (in my opinion) realistic challenges that need
to be addressed.
I wish you the very best of luck.
Regards,
Scott
