I'm going to jump in on this just because no one else has yet.
DO. NOT. START. A. HOSTING. BUSINESS.
There is absolutely nothing that you can provide to your customers they can't get somewhere else with either more features or a lower price or both.
If you try to start a web hosting company that markets exclusively on the web with no other products and services other than domains/hosting/ssl/etc you are going to fail.
Look at all of the hosting providers here on WJunction. How many do you see? Why do you think WJunction has such strict rules on how they conduct themselves on this forum? How many threads have you seen here about people getting screwed when a host goes under?
Let me answer those questions for you. There are a lot of them, they are all going after the same customers on the same website with the same services and generally the only difference between them is how low some idiot is willing to price his hosting. Then later on the idiot i mentioned before who now has a bunch of customers that don't even begin to cover his costs because they are only paying $1 a month BEFORE payment service fees is losing money and can't sustain his business.
You aren't going to be able to compete on tech. The big multi-million dollar hosting companies like SingleHop and RackSpace and Amazon AWS have that on lock down. After all, they can afford to innovate.
You aren't going to be able to compete on price. Look at how many companies have sub $1.50 per month plans listed here. Ask them how that's working out. You have to sell a hell of a lot of hosting to a hell of a lot of people to cover your costs at $1.50 a month per user.
You aren't going to be able to compete on customer service. You can't offer the tech, so you decide to compete on price. Now you don't have enough to really even cover your server costs let alone hire someone to do tickets or provide support for you. Your service is going to suck. Period.
So now you have poor service which causes high turnover in your clients, you have low prices and aren't making enough money so you decide to call it quits.
The cycle then continues when someone else comes on these forums and asks about starting a hosting business.
If you are looking for a hobby, go find something that doesn't affect other people and their data when you decide it isn't worth doing anymore.
If you are in this for a get rich quick, it's not going to happen. If you don't have the technical experience required to setup, maintain and backup servers while avoiding security threats and DDoS, don't get into this business.
