I'm looking for somebody who's willing to put up aprox $4,000 to buy two webservers for a web hosting buisness. I can get 2 intel dual 1 GHZ p3s with 2 GBs of ram for that price, and would like to set up a buisness with those two servers (I have bandwidth worked out already). The partner should be an able nix admin, and hopefully code in perl of php too.

Unless I'm loosing my mind are you looking for someone to program AND put up 4,000 or just one? (im trying to understand what youre bringing to the table besides 2 really over priced servers)? Ty

$4,000 flat is much better than paying $2,000/month, wouldn't you agree? All this person has to do is buy the prelim servers, and work on the coding of a control panel *with me*.

On the subject of the server being over priced, I would love to see your source of 2 1U Dual 1 Ghz processer servers with 2 GB of RAM for $4,000?

Revelation,
<edit>Thanks for the clarrification. After making my response I noticed your *with me* statement, which I had not realized from before. You may have more luck if you contribute to the server costs or in some fiscal manner to even out the score but thats just an idea.
</edit>

As for the server price I'd be glad to help you get a few for a better price if you like (the real trick is building them yourself or finding a friend who does).

Maybe I didn't make myself clear? I *am* paying for the bandwidth ;), and will be helping with the programming. I would like somebody to pay for the initial servers and to help me with the backend system (I will probably modify somebody's prepackaged system as I'm rather buisy). I'm going to end up paying *most* of the long term fees, but I'd like a programmer/system admin to join up too.

Revelation - sorry about that, I got the point (and changed my post a bit) just as you started making your post ;)

You got me closer to junior guru wannabe or whatever the next posting level is :)

On the issue of hardware: You generally aren't going to be able to get high quality hardware for under 2k. Considering that the processer is dual 1 GHZ and comes with 2 GBs of ram I don't know any better deals. If you go through IBM, etc, you're going to find something of this caliber at $4,000-$5,000+. IMO this is a good deal on hardware ;)

Revelation -
I beg to differ, even with the recent increase in ram prices, I can still build a GOOD dual machine for far under 2k (even after markup). Thats with an adaptec scsi controller, ibm scsi drives, cosrair ram, intel p3 chips and a tyan motherboard. Thats not dell but its real close and a lot more cost effective.

Of course if your buying the machine from a 3rd party withotu a volume discount, 2,000 is a very good price so your 110% right on that part ;)

How abour RAM? (2 Gigs)
Wanna build one of those for me? ;)

How much HD Space (hopefully 72 Gigs?)

I'm sure others will say this, but nobody seems to have done so yet so I'll jump in first: Start small. Unless you're an advertising guru, it will be many months before you have enough customers to fill up *one* such server, let alone two. And if you're going to be working on your control panel right now... well, you don't need two expensive servers sitting in an expensive colocation facility if all you're doing is writing code pre-launch. (Or were you planing on taking in customers before your control panel is finished?)

That's a very good point... why do you need TWO servers? Especially with those servers being so high spec, you're obviously expecting a LOT of customers... but what if you don't get those customers, then $4,000 (or however much the servers will cost) will be wasted.

Alan

An average size customer base to begin with.... and I'm working out some deals with a couple of groups, etc for more customers.

so what does the person who puts up the 4000 get in return

the deal is close. We have decided to focus on our colocation services before we begin to offer shared services.

Good move!!

Are you going to build your own facility for colo?

Jim

is something we will consider when we get more bandwidth. Right now we colocate in two tier one provider's data centers. We (will be) running dual 100 MBPS feeds from Ardent by the end of the month, and are running a smaller 25 MBPS feed from Verio's premiere data center in Seatle.

I'm hoping to increase bandwidth usage by a good bit before I decide on setting up my own NOC.