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Comment by gscott | Hacker News Reader

Some collocation facilities have their own servers you can pay a little more for usually around $100 to 120 a month with everything you need and root access to completely control the server.

I like dedicated servers even though the world is going to the cloud, a dedicated server gives you control over your costs.

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I'm trying to start a hosting startup, and feel it would be out of the question to use a provider for my use-case.

For a hosting start up I would suggest getting a massive server and paying for it by an equipment lease. Personally I manage two racks full of servers and if I had a magic wand it would be awesome just to have one or two big servers. (64 gigs of ram, lots of 2.5 drives, 4 or 6 processors)

Right now co-location providers are desperate because Amazon and others are taking away a lot of their business so you can get a good price.

I have a friend (manages his own servers) who has a hosting business and he brings in enough to be happy, about $10k a month. He hosts ASP and .NET sites with no marketing budget he just posts to various forums and website hosting comparison sites.

I really like Supermicro servers and Dell Servers.... Supermicro makes some really big servers that you can add your own components to and I find them very reliable. For a friend some years ago I put together a $24k server and they paid for it with a business lease through Bank of America.

I used to own the domain ehosting.com and tried doing hosting but it just isn't my thing. Getting everything to work for a people was far more work then I expected. If I were to try again I would just offer virtualized servers and not have any hand in customers setups.

Having a specialty in hosting I believe is important. For example for $14.95 a month from GoDaddy I have an account with unlimited space and unlimited domains. I have hosted about 30 domains and 24 gigs of files all for $14.95. I also have a virtualized server from GoDaddy for $39.95 a month which I use a coupon code and save about 20% off a month.

Thanks, but I prefer small, cheap 1U's because this first server is just a test run/demo, and also because it's easier to scale.

It's great if you want to start out with an inexpensive server but it is harder to scale with 1u servers. You can't fill a whole rack with them because of the electricity requirements, there are more servers to fail, more servers to keep updated, just a real pain in the hind end.

"A hosting company" is a vague thing to want to setup, at the low-end you can have a single rack with random boxes in it.

But to scale you need to consider running an AS, peering, redundant feeds, PSUs, having remote access to reimage machines, etc, etc.

So rather than saying you want to be a host you'd get better response0s if you said what kind of hosting person you want to be? Random wordpress? Giving remote root on virtual machines? (Whats your antispam policy? How will you monitor incoming/outgoing bandwidth? What kind of routers will you use? What network topology to increase uptime? How many geographical locations?)

Lots of people started hosting companies back in the day by filling racks with servers, before power costs made it hard, and these days reselling AWS, etc, is the simplest way to start - no need to worry about infrastructure, and still reasonably reliable.

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