Reselling dedicated servers - Advice needed

B

BlackStorm

New member
Hey,
I have a few people looking to get dedicated servers through me but I don't offer dedicated at the minute.
I have thought about it in the past but never really looked into it in depth.
I would like to offer dedicated servers, both managed and unmanaged through my site.
Could anyone here tell me if it is worth it and also suggest where to resell for?
Any past experience would be get information and would really help me.

Thanks
John
 
John, through my experiences, reselling servers is not worth it. It brings more problems to you and your clients. Everytime something goes wrong with the server, they call you, you call the datacenter, the datacenter returns your call, you call back your client. . . getting the picture??

Plus you are maybe going to get 10-15% profit. If you are going to make any money in the dedicated server business, you would be better off picking up a larger rack (16u's to start) and putting together a few 2-4 U computers and shipping them to the center. I would also only offer semi managed services or fully managed, otherwise you are only going to make $10-15 per month on each dedicated server.


But if you do decide to look for reseller, I would try go through someone besides Nocster, we've all seen the WHT newbies cutting their costs down to make maybe 3% profit margins, its rediculous
 
It can be worth it...if you are the person doing the maintaining, and if there's a team to help you out. And if you really really like it. Don't forget that bit. And...forget trying to compete strictly on price, at least initially, unless you want to become a server farm. (Not a bad thing to be, but you'd better have staffers in place to handle the customer support and network maintenance.)

Other problems that I've come up with, just thinking about high usage plans:

If you go the dedicated server route, offer good service. People will pay more for a well-managed dedicated server if the service is good, responsive, quick, and genuinely helpful.

...and keep in mind that the folks who surf the various hosting forums are not the entirety of the hosting market.
 
Yeah I think about all that in terms of reseller and shared hosting.
I think I try to provide that at the minute for shared accounts and resellers, don't compete on price, but quality.

Anyone able to recommend a good company to resell for?
Don't think I would go with Nocster anyway, they seem to have a lot of networks problems, even thought they seem to be getting better as of lately.
 
John Diver said:
Anyone able to recommend a good company to resell for?
Don't think I would go with Nocster anyway, they seem to have a lot of networks problems, even thought they seem to be getting better as of lately.
Click to expand...

Why don't you start with Ev1? If you're going to add value added services I guess it would be awsome. Since their network has never been down for more than 0.5%. I think they never had an outage, actually. Besides the fire and the power issue.

Try out Ezzi's too.

About the market thing, depends... I love doing what I do, but I really don't like it in a way, on my first months, I lost over $600 in Fraud... However that didn't happened anymore, since now I'm smarter than them, and got some Anti-Fraud Software installed on the billing interface.

If you are good at Shared Hosting and you're happy with it, why do you want more problems?, if your clients are looking for that, ask a Datacenter IF they want more business in their pocket, so you reffer your clients to them and you earn a Comission on their Montly fee. In that way you won't offer D.Servers directly, you will only sell to clients that you already know, and the NOC will support your clients and be held the responsability. And you will still make money out of it. That's the best move you can do, IMO.
 
If you are good at Shared Hosting and you're happy with it, why do you want more problems?
Click to expand...

My clients grow and I would also like to grow along with them and provide what they need, to be able to offer every step of the way for them to grow their business and stay with the one company if they are happy with what I am already providing.

I didn't know data centres would offer what your suggested, but I would like to provide managed servers to customers, so I don't think that would work to be honest.

Thanks Francisco, great post :)
John
 
So then initially, you'll make these available only to current clients, rather than the general public? That will make things a little easier - you won't have to be ready to purchase / lease a huge number of servers immediately. Also, if people are current clients of yours, they know your service and are (presumably) happy, so they probably won't be switching to a different server company any time soon.

I would be cautious about the unmanaged servers, though. People can get unmanaged servers in many other places for much less - though again, if these are existing clients, they already know you and know your support team.
 
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