I have been a reseller for a little over 4 years now and have been very happy with the living it has provided for me. I have gotten to the point where I need to start looking at taking my hosting business to the next level.

I am weighing the options of co-locating. On the one hand, as a reseller I do not have to deal with anything on the techinical side. Which is good since I don't know how to build or run a server. I don't have any liablilites or responsibilities for keeping the machines running. All I have to do is advertise, provide support and bill my customers. On the other hand, I can probably hire a systems admin and co-locate a server for the same monthly cost of being a reseller. This would mean more long term profits for me as I grow. I also have to take into account the licensing and setup fees I will have to pay to build a server. My biggest problem with this is I would have to move my clients from my current host to the new server. This would not be so bad, if it wasn't for the fact that my current provider moved there NOC about a year ago so half of my current clients went through that whole hassle not too long ago.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated. For the people here that moved from reseller to becoming a co-locater, what has your experience been with this process.

Wow, four years... what kinda customer base do you have with that?

Not as many as I should have ;) To be honest, it wasn't really 4 years. I have been in business for 4 years but I was not always growing my user base. For about a year, I stopped promoting and simply maintained my current users because of a consulting job I took at an unrelated Internet company. I was putting too many hours in to provide support for more customers than I already had. So, things like that along the way have stunted my growth, but not anymore :)

Id say colocate as you have even more control over what you can offer

I'm guessing if you have a decent amount of customers Not using up A LOT of bandwidth, then dedicated would be the way to go.

I would go dediacted as you still have not so much hassle with administration.

Dont co-locate but rent a managed server, you will get little or no help with a co-located server so your best bet is to probably rent a server. You might want to try contacting pwebtech they should be able to sort you out.