I'm sure you can earn money from this type of business but I'm not sure how. I too want to start up a webhosting company myself one day but can't figure out how to get a good, fast, dedicated internet connection with tons of bandwidth for a reasonable price. There's so many different ways to connect to the net these days, how can you possibly choose?

Personally, I'd tier all your pricing so people who just want weblogs or webspace pay next to nothing and you make your money by quantity of low paying customers. All of these customers would also have to display a banner to you webhosting site and/or set up their sites as a subdomain of yours.

Also, you'll need a website for people to learn of your company so I'd suggest you make sure your site is not only up 24/7 but super fast when it comes to loading (even on dial up). When looking for a possible webhost, I skip over the sites where their page loads slowly. I figure it they can't optimize their own site, what chances are there that mine will run smoothly? I'd also suggest that you hide none of your pricing, make it easily accessible and no more than a click away from the main page.

As far as features are concerned I know that it's important in this day and age to offer at least:
- spam protection
- reasonable bandwidth
- image gallery support
- open source software such as php, phpnuke, etc.
- templates
- control panel such as Ensim
- a bit of storage (I don't look at anything under a few gigs).
- a few databases

That's what I'd look for and that was pretty much what I started looking for before I even put up Lifesupporters.com. At the time I knew way less than I currently do (as unbelievable as that may sound), but I knew to look for that.

At the end of the day I'd say that the more diversity you can add to a webhosting package, the better.