Business Insurance?

[ZenMasterJoe]

Hello,

I'm new to hosting (really not even really started yet!) and I just registered to this site. I have been browsing the different forums and I read somewhere that one hosting company has insurance. Is there business insurance that I should be looking at?

My company is made up of myself and a partner so is insurance necessary?

Any opinions on the subject are appreciated.
:whythis:

[tranz]

The best answer that I can give you is to talk to counsel about this. People here will give you different answers but when it comes to something that you can be held for legaly dont look to a forum for the answer.

We have it to cover the costs of our servers and if the servers do anything that will harm or destroy the data center we're in. This was advised to us by our attorney on staff.

[alex042]

We have it to cover the costs of our servers and if the servers do anything that will harm or destroy the data center we're in. This was advised to us by our attorney on staff.
What kind of insurance did they advise you to get? I was told by my insurance agent that standard business liability insurance, which is only like $500/yr wouldn't cover us. They listed off some other specific policies we would need like cyberspace insurance for hosting, errors and omissions for design, and something else for computer repair all of which could be $100's/m.

[tranz]

We had to be able to cover at least $350K.

[alex042]

We had to be able to cover at least $350K.
But what 'kind' or 'type' of insurance did you need?

We can get something like a $1,000,000 umbrella policy as a general liability policy for around $500/yr, but according to our insurance agent, it supposedly doesn't cover the hosting aspects of our business or those other areas I mentioned.

[lelahosting]

in our insurance policy it has certain amendements specificly for hosting, etc

[hermie]

yes, they will review the amendments. try checking out <<ADMIN NOTE: First post, no URLs.>> might help with concerns. goodluck!

[Ambienthost]

Joe - it depends if your doing this for a hobby then no, if you want to do it as a real job then yes you need to protect your investments

if you have 5 or less colo servers then i would say dont worry about it

if your going to be investing 10k + i would probably look at some insurance

[I, Brian]

There are different types of insurance in these areas - for the UK at least - such as Public Liability Insurance which is the cheap and easy sort - then there's Professional Liability Insurance, which is when the banks start running scared because your business is involved with this new fangled internet thingy that they don't understand, and charge accordingly.

My policy at present is that it's cheaper to join major business groups who will provide help with legal costs - ie, the FSB - than spend stupid amounts protecting myself against an unlikely eventuality that the banks are so scared about they'd rather screw me blind.

2c. :)

[ownageservers]

Joe - it depends if your doing this for a hobby then no, if you want to do it as a real job then yes you need to protect your investments

if you have 5 or less colo servers then i would say dont worry about it


In Some Ways, I agree with this, but in others, you still have to make sure you have something to cover yourself if something were to go wrong. Losing a 1000$+ server could kill a hobby really quickly when you were making enough money to pay for insurance.

[HostsWebs]

I would spend more money on writing my terms of service than investing couple of hundred dollars on insurance the first month of my business. Then again, it's upto you. :o: