i know there tens of thousands of shared hosting sites out there, but how many offer/specialize in dedicated servers? im thinking couple hundred?

holding pinky to mouth

1 millllllion business's

Way more than a couple hundred. There are probably a thousand or so per state.

On google, "buy cheap dedicated server" brings up 87,800 results.

There are lots however I think a fair majority of them may be resellers

Yeah, i think there are 3000x more resellers compared to companies that actually own their own DC.

While there may only be a several dozen (upto a few hundred I guess) actual Data center that offer public servers, thousands and thousands of companies rent part of those data center and offer servers of their own. These aren't resellers persay, they may not own their own DC but buying half a rack is just like renting some space in a auto mall, you sell your own car, you aren't reselling. Certainly there is far less competition then in the general shared hosting market but it's also a tougher sell as this is mission critical stuff we're talking about. After all, if a server goes down you better be able to fix it; fial to fix it and your name is toast. Then you have to consider competing against rackshack for cheap servers or rackspace for high end.... good luck.....

In the UK very few business own their own DC, a great number of us use Netral Colo afcailities and rent space by the rack/cage/suite.

Reselling of Dedicated servers doesn't appear to be as big overhere - the majority of those offering dedicated have their own facilities and access etc in DC's like Telehouse, Redbus etc

Yea lots of actualy datacenters rent their servers out to other companies then sometimes those companies lower the price(how? i do not know) and then those companies sell share hosting from that dedicated server. That's the way it looks to me. If I was going to buy a dedicated server I'd just go straight to rackshack or Ezzi.net probably.