Anyone have a guide to selling dedicated servers? Thanks

.......... I really don't know what to say to that, except No I don't. I don't think anyone else will either, I can of course tell you my entire buisness plan if you want, maybe that will help ?

A guide to "selling" dedicated servers?

Just like there are guides to web hosting business(shared accounts/resellers) Im lookign for dedicated server business....

Do you have a business model and/or plan? We can probably give you a lot of good advise but we would need to know what kind of market you are going after. Are you going to sell low end servers, high end servers, high bandwidth, managed, self-managed etc...? Do you have a facility lined up to house your servers? Are you looking to be a reseller or a self-contained host?

Are you looking for flash tutorials? Like a flash tutorials series for using cPanel? H-Sphere? etc? If so check out Demo Wolf ( http://www.demowolf.com/). I doubt they get into the "selling" part, but they show you how to use different panels.
Maybe you can help us and explain a little better what your trying to do. Are you looking for "selling" infomation? Or tutorials your clients can view?

What I mean is starting a Web Hosting company offering dedicated servers.
I dont know a better way of stating it.

There are a lot of factors to consider before someone can just give you a tutorial. For instance, do you have any capital to start with? Do you have a data center close by that you are going to use? What bandwidth providers do you have available to you and what are they charging you per Mbps? If you cant give us some information you are not going to get any good advice.

Okay, well, on WHT there's 2 sections you might want to look at.
Dedicated Server Tutorials;
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=69
and Running a Web Hosting Business Tutorials;
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=94
I hope that helps.

I did some pricing at crnc(datacenter) and a 1U server. From my varying tests I dont see it being "profitable" From 1 test the most I could see earning on 1 server was about 80-150 a month and that is after your ROI..

Unless im doing something wrong. What is that point of that when you can just do shared hosting?

I'm not sure there's much of a market just reselling dedicated servers. I think many hosts offer them as an upgrade path for their shared or reseller hosting clients, but not so much as their primary product. IMO most companies selling only dedicated servers, typically own their own equipement and quite often, their own data center.

That's my take on it.... I could be wrong though ;)

Regards,

Rob.

Do you know what market niche you're going after? I think that's the question people are trying to get across to you.

Dedicated servers mainly go to other businesses while shared hosting goes to both. There's a few dedicated servers sold to consumers, but most of them are sold to other businesses.

Do some research on the hardware and infastructure needed to run a dedicated server business then we'll be happy to answer all of your questions.

I know a lot about dedicated servers and that's why I resell a lot of them, but when it comes to running them in my own data center or my own network, that's where I stop because there's plenty of people out there that can do a better job than me and I can use them to profit.

That might be something you should get into first. Then start colocating in a good facility and then maybe start up your own network with your own providers.

There's A LOT to comprehend before even thinking about starting in that businesses. If you're not a technical kind of guy then you might want to hold off on that and read a lot of books. Business and technical books to teach you how to manage your business and your network.

Theres two main ways you can accomplish this. You can resell for a data center which has the lowest startup cost but severely limits your options because you are forced to use their hardware setups. You could co locate your own equipment but this is expensive to start. Long term co location will provide a successfull business with more profit.

I think you need to research your business plan before considering reselling servers.


Those who fail to plan, plan to fail. Obviously you don't wanna fail!


John

Never said I plan on offering it. Im just looking for some insight because the research I have done doesnt seem quite profitable. So I was asking for some type of guide/insight on offering dedicated.