Given what you've described here and other threads on this board, I'd hate to recommend you get the advertising and not do well. Personally, being a hoster myself, I don't think you're quite ready and the level of commitment to it isn't quite there. What happens on your server when your 2 hours are up? Do your customers have to wait 22 hours before you even know about a situation? Customer support issues as well. Rather than being a web hosting service have you thought about being a web developer. Your knowledge areas indicate that field more than managing and running web servers. Either way it's a tough market because both are glutted but you might have a better chance with web development at the present time while working on the skills for operating a hosting service in the future.
You can expect a maximum of 3% from the number of people seeing your advert to follow up on it. From that you might catch 1% of new business. The numbers seem dismal, I'm sure, but not buying advertising brings far smaller numbers. Since it's an industry type magazine it has a targeted audience of potential hosting customers so your followup might be higher but don't count on it. No type of advertising is full proof or promises a good return on investment. That's something you have to decide for yourself but if you don't take chances and do something, you already know what you'll have.
The larger, well established companies have gotten a lion's share of the business because of time in business and being well known as a result. However, large companies tend to fall down in a number of areas where smaller companies, like us, can fill a niche while still offering competitive pricing.
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