Our company mainly offers reseller plans, but many are outgrowing their plans and wanting Dedicated servers. This is something we would like to start offering. However, this is new to us and would appreciate any guidance. Example: Should we simply resale dedicated servers or purchase and co-locate our own. Thank you in advance for your time and knowledge!

Best Regards!
Sean

I am no experts but I believe that since you are new at it, it would be better to resell dedicated servers so that you will minimize your out-of-pocket expenses and could add and reduce your leased machines as and when you like. I know in the long run it would be cheaper to colo but since you are new, there are some configuration and hardware components which is better left to the experts. Moreover on the business end, if you do not tie your customers down to a long term contract, it might be difficult to recoup the cost of the hardware, shipping and upgrades needed. With dedicated, your clients can lease a month and give it up without any pinch to you. With colo, you might be stuck with a server at the datacenter which is unused. With Dedicated, set up time can be anything between 1 hour to 72 hours but colo, you need to build, test then shipped which might take a week or so.

I would supposed that only if you need some specialized hardware build, dedicated should be the way to go, it would pose as with less problems. Any faulty components would be the responsibility of your web host and not yours like in the case for colo.

Besides, the cost of colo may not drastically be any difference from the cost of dedicated anyways.

Hope that helps.

Thank you for your reply. What you said makes a lot of sense. I' was leaning toward reselling, but just wanted other opinions. Also does anyone know of some good companies to resell dedicated servers (preferably NO cogent).
Thanks!

I believe that Nocster.com has an affilitate or resellers plan for dedicated servers and there is a discount/commission for approved resellers. But they seems to be overloaded with requests and their response time was a little slow. They just hired new staffs and probably you could give them a couple of months to stabilize.

Alternatively, you could lease a rackshack.net , dedicatednow.com or serveroutsource.net servers and do a value-added service (such as 'manage' the server for them and provide support) and you could market them for a higher price for your service.

I am clueless here and would let the others come out with better answers than this.