Sharyn, your planned business has a few similarities to my own. I begun by
renting my office computer in my restaurant to customers. There's virtually no
startup costs other than advertising by going this route, since you're offering
what you already have or would have obtained for yourself anyway.
A risk with this method is that a stupid or malicious user will eventually mess
up your one and only machine, leaving you both unable to serve other customers
as well has without a machine and personal files of your own. For this reason I
have since added a customer only machine so that customers do not touch the
computer my business relies on. Having said this, however, I confess I've never
actually had such a problem.
Demand for Internet access here is weak, so I'm not getting rich. It always
provides some extra income and brings in new customers for my restaurant,
however, so my goals are being met.
I've only had one case of sex surfers in three years... a couple of giggling
teenagers. Their Internet connection inexplicable went down, what a shame ;-)
Some firewalls can lock out (blacklist) the sites you specify, but I prefer to
deal with such cases individually and personally.
Some cybercaf� owners worry about about downloads but I don't. Frankly the more
time customers spend online the more money I make. What I don't allow is
running the download on my machine. Most operating systems allow you to lock
out unauthorized executable files, and I've done that. Go ahead, download Back
Orifice to my machine... but you can't install it. Ditto the morons who click
on "virus.exe" that came as an email attachment. Lock it out in the OS, and set
your browser's preferences to download executables to the user's floppy disk,
not to execute them.
And you _do_ have a virus scanner and a firewall on your machine, don't you?
Sure, you could get DSL or ISDN or cable or broadband satellite or a T1 straight
to a backbone. My customers, who are almost exclusively Hotmailers, wouldn't
notice the difference. My 56K dialup connection is perfectly adequate for
emailing and a lot cheaper. Your needs will depend on what your customers want
to do with the connection.
For one machine, pencil and paper is fine for timing and billing. If you want
to present a professional appearance, I use the CafeLink timer free for the
download at:
http://www.cafelink.com/
Best of luck!
Warren Post, Owner
The Cybercaf� at Pizza Pizza
Santa Rosa de Cop�n, Honduras
http://sites.netscape.net/srcopan/cybercafe.htm
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