As the title states, just thought I'd get some opinions.

I have found in the past that resellers allowed for a greater profit margin, however most of my "trouble" customers have been resellers - although I have spoken to other people who have had the opposite experience.

I do not deal with resellers anymore, however. :)

If done right, my experience has been dedicated servers can provide the largest profit margin.

That being said, in my experience they've also been the hardest to do right.

@derek, thats what we're thinking, we're new and started with shared but the profits in it are so low because of overselling combined with super cheap hosts offering huge amounts of disk space/bandwidth on massive clusters. So we moved to dedi (will move), because we think this is the best area. However, I can see how vps's could make lots of money if done well, but overselling causes problems there too. Thankfully you can't really oversell diskspace on dedicated servers (although it's possible to oversell bandwidth if unmetered).

If super-cheap hosts who oversell are hurting your business and you can't compete with their prices, perhaps you ought to rethink your target demographic. :)

Guess so :) Still, most people look for the cheapest option. Yes, we can go for a niche or whatever, but in reality, it's not worth much money ;)

1. Dedicated - Great, if priced properly you can get $600 odd a month in profit per client. ;)
2. Shared - Exceptional & with a proper support system you can minimize overhead to nearly zero.
3. Reseller - Great, with the right clients. Can be hell ;)
4. VPS - Requires too much infrastructure to be competitive 'profitwise' with the other 3, but if done properly it can succeed. The hardware requirements for a well-run virtual environment can be very expensive.

Dedicated offers the largest margins if you price things right. If you're after the wrong market though, shared will probably be your largest 'margins', as dedicated would endure too many support costs. It all depends on which marketbase you're targeting & without specifics it would be hard to gauge.

The above 4 are based on my own experience though.
Enjoy.

David hit the nail on the head with the biggest hammer available.

In terms of being lucrative with your DC space, I'd say reseller accounts and shared is where it's at, because you can get the largest revenue per server once it has been "filled" with accounts. Obviously you have to factor in support costs for each different options.

I would have posted more, but David basically said everything I would have tried to, and did it 10 times as well as me.