How do you get your first few customers and how can you convince them you are legitimate when you have no reputation?

I was think of perhaps offering the first month of service free to see if I can net any of those people?

I am new here and first would like to say that this forum is great. I have read a lot in here until I finally desided to sign up.

As you certainly can see in my Englisch, I am not from an Englisch speaking country. I am from beautiful Austria (small country in Europe :-))
My name is Dominik and I am a student who would like to start his own hosting business to earn a bit of money. I know that this isn’t as simple as it looks and that it is certainly a lot of work! I thought about it for a long time, and I still want to do it.

But there are quite some things I am not sure about and I would be happy if you could give me an advise.

First to my plan:
I think it would be best for me to start as an reseller. So I don’t have to care about the technic at the beginning and don’t have to guarantee that my servers are save. Although I am studing a technical subject and it wouldn’t be a great problem, I prefer that other people do this for me at the moment.

As an reseller you don’t have much choice. You can only host normal sites. Later I would like to conenctrate on a special kind of hosting. (e.g. Subversion Hosting) But therefor I would need root access to the server.

In the area I live there are a lot of webdesigners that have a small amount of customers. Most of them just tell the customers to sign up at a hosting provider. So I think I could sell a reseller account to them. this would increse there service and they could earn a little money. I think at the beginning I don’t do a lot of marketing. I just call the webdesigners personally and tell them about my offer. Then I will send them a mail with a demo account and hope that they will like it.

I think with this plan I can sell more expensive reseller accounts and so have more money with the same amount of customers. Of course a reseller needs more support but I think its easier to get customers that way.

For this plan I need a master reseller account. I found one unlimed/unlimed account at vebnest.com for just a 25dollars/month. I think this cannot work. How should the finance it. I have also read bad things about them on your forum. Now I am searching for a good hosting provider but I didn’t find one yet. Do you have any advises? Would be very pleased. I would like to have a cheap host, but a host that I can trust that I do not get suspended without any reason. How difficult is the moving to an other provider later? Has anybody experience?

The next thing I need is cheap domains. I have some offers now. But now my problem. I need .at, .de, .com, .eu, .org, .info, .name, .biz, Domains. The main Domains are .at, .de and .com. So I want good prices for them. Do you know any reseller. At the moment I have ofer 20 offers and when I take 4 offers I would have the cheapest price for each TLDs. Now my question: does it make sense to register each tld at an other reseller just too save a bit? How difficult and expensive is the moving later to an other reseller later. Has anybody experience.

Of course I know that I will have to register a company and pay taxes. I think I don’t have any problems with this, because my sister could help me there.

But the thing that I am most afraid are the legal things. What can happen to me if one of my customers hostes illegal content. (e.g. music or software) I cannot check the spaces all the time. Can an customer get money from me when the site is offline and it is an online shop. I cannot do anything against an offline site as an reseller. What can an customer do against me when his data gets lost. I know that I will have to write this things in the toc. But what else can happen and what can I do against it.
Attention: I live in Austria (Europe) so maybe the situation is differnet there.

I would be glad if anybody could give me an advise. What do you think of the idea in general. Do you thing I will be able to earn money with this? Are there any risks I didn’t think about? Has anybody of you started such a business? How are you doing?

Thanks a lot

Greatings Dominik