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How to start off

Hi,
I've been wanting to start a small VPS hosting company but I'm not sure how to start off. I have started writing some business plans to work out costs/profit/workload etc. and have come to my biggest issue yet.
I have received two quotes (from different companies who both have great reputations) on dedicated servers that I plan on doing Xen and OpenVZ virtualizations off of.
First:
Core2Quad Q6600
8GB RAM
500GB RAID HD (4x 250gb HDs)
100Mbps port
10Mbps BW (approx. 3300 GB monthly)
Advanced DDoS protection
Free remote reboot
CentOS 64 bit
w/32 ips - $279/mo
w/64 ips - $294/mo
Second:
Core2Quad Q9300
8GB RAM
750BG HD - no RAID/secondary HD - RAID1 upgrade available @ $45/mo and forced upgrade to 750GB secondary HD for $45
100Mbps port
2000GB monthly BW w/ option to upgrade
No standardized protection
Free remote reboot
CentOS 64 bit
w/ 32 ips - $182/mo
w/ 64 ips - $214/mo
Which one do you recommend I use?
A little background info:
I plan on mainly advertising on a few IRC networks that I am a server admin on (I figure the 10,000 people combined on them will amount to a sufficient amount of customers) and some forums I admin.
So I think the first plan might be good (because of the extremely lenient policy, DDoS protection, extra bandwidth, and extra HD's with RAID) but I wonder if it would be worth it. Would raising prices slightly still attract customers?
I also like the second one because it would be easier to offer cheaper prices and still make a good profit (although I want to please my customers, everyone wants to make a profit )

[RapidRick]

Hello, although you will need to do your own testing, I can tell you that one or two 7200rpm sata disks with 8GB of memory is not efficient. You should be looking at 4-6 spindles in raid10 to properly sell 8GB worth of virtualized memory. An option worth considering would be to decrease the amount of disk space you offer, and step up to scsi disks or add additional sata spindles and stripe the data.
One 7200 sata disk can sustain 70 random iops.





__________________a. ping "web-hosting-company".com. Search that IP at arin.net. Web Hostings Dirty Secret
b. the company displayed by arin.net has full network and likely server control and is the real provider
A 99.999% SLA means nothing when 90% of the service continuince is beyond the control of the reseller.Choose a Provider with physical network/server access/ownership.

[gplhost]

Well, you talked about all but the most important piece of hardware: the motherboard!!!
Thomas





__________________
GPLHost:>_ open source hosting worldwide
Web spaces featuring our leading LGPL control panel and our Xen VPS hosting solution
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I would make sure you ask a few questions of your provider to ensure you are getting what you think you are.
Is the 10Mbps of bandwidth symmetrical or is there any rate limiting of any kind on it?
What is their SLA on a hardware failure?
Do they keep spare parts for this server in inventory?
What do they charge for a hardware upgrade?
From my experience building virtuals I have never deployed a server with only 8GG of RAM. You will run out of memory well before you will run out of processing power.

Continuing on the above post by Lowetec, if you're looking to sell/lease VPS, I would at least start with 12-16GB's of RAM. You're not going to be able to do too awful much with 8GB's of RAM when you take into account your system, OS and CP.
It sounds like a lot of RAM, but it's really not . If it were on a shared hosting server, 4-8GB's of RAM would be fine, but when you're looking to offer dedicated RAM quotas, it's a different ballgame.





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[gplhost]

Different people, different opinion. I do not agree with the above, I think it's best to have less people on the server to keep quality. People with high RAM usage should go for a dedicated server, as of course, they are also using a lot of CPU and slowing down the overall server.
Thomas





__________________
GPLHost:>_ open source hosting worldwide
Web spaces featuring our leading LGPL control panel and our Xen VPS hosting solution
Available in Singapore, Sydney, Seattle, Florida, Paris, London, Barcelona and Israel