Re: FN-FORUM: Hosting Question

date posted 1st October 2005 01:31

It basically comes down to the company having space in a rack cabinet,
buying/building the machine, either as its ordered or in bulk then
plugging them in as they're needed.

A lot of companies who offer re-seller services will basically do all
the work for you, all you have to do is manage your website and accept
the money from customers then pay the larger host from that money.

There's also the option of renting co-lo space/bandwidth from another
host and putting your own servers in their rack while still using their
routers/network for the data transit.

Once you have the budget to go big you start renting full racks, buying
your own routers, firewalls, more machines etc.., setting up your own
peering with other ISPs, buying transit based on how much data you need
to transfer over it (based on what you're selling your customers) at
this stage you'll start paying for the bandwidth rather than the actual
transit amount, say if you want to beable to transfer at a speed of
10mbit constantly then you may pay someone £20 per month (or whatever
the rate is based on whether its full/partial) per mbit (then have the
option of it being burstable upto the full speed of the connection).

Most ISPs will start off small and build their way up through the
levels, maybe start off with a shared reseller account from another ISP,
then move onto renting their own dedicated servers from the same place
and running shared hosting on there, then move onto having their own
servers co-located, then look at getting their own network etc...

Once you get to a certain size (once it becomes cheaper) you'll start
paying the data centre directly for the space you're using and buy your
own racks to put there with all your own kit in there.

Of course if you have the money and think you have the customers you
could always try and jump straight into having your own racks in a data
centre and setup your network all at once.

Good luck however you do it.

Mick.

Tam Denholm wrote:
> This is a question to the people running hosting companies, or at
> least someone that knows how they do it. Im looking for a trade secret
> (its a secret to me anyway), how do hosting companies offer dedicated
> servers? I understand the process of offering everything up to ded's,
> eg, shared/vps etc, but to offer dedicated servers how do you do this?
> Do you need a big enough budget to buy some space in a datacenter and
> purchase and install the machines yourself, can you re-sell another
> hosters ded's or contact a datacenter and ask for a package of X
> amount of machines?
>
> Im not looking into going into the business of selling dedicated
> servers, at least at the moment, but im hopefully going to be there in
> the distant future and want to be clued in and learn a little more
> before i get to that stage.
>
> Thanks for anyone that can answer.
>
> Tam Denholm
>