I am looking to start a true hosting company offering dedicated servers, I have 37 linux systems with apache.

what type of connection or backbone will I need, routers??

if anyone has any useful sites or information to share please do, I purchased these servers at a auction and want to put them to use.

again any info you can share would be great.

I may be interested in a working partner, a linux admin etc.

thanks

Swate, just some basic info for you for now as I have a few things I need to rush out too. Also have a couple of questions as to what you plan on doing so that I can answer better.

First when asking about how to price them there are serveral other factors in how to price. Listed below are the key features of pricing.

1: How much bandwidth?
2: How fast are the CPUs?
3: What are your costs for bandwidth, and other expenses?
4: And control panels?
5: Managed or unmanaged?

Now onto the actuall things you should look into when setting up your company. First off depending on the money you have available you may want to start with co-locating servers rather than build yourself a datacenter from scratch. Co-location allows you to only pay for what your using rather than have all this equipment sitting around costing you cash.

(I'm out of time so I will add more later)

Lippy pretty much covered it .. the hardware may be the same, but it is the SERVICE that makes the price.

After all, why else would anyone go with rackspace?

And uptime. Even the cheapest penny-pincher online will balk at the cheapest hosting if it is down most of the time, and upgrade to a more expensive hoster that can provide a good track-record and/or guarantee.

swate, would you be interested in a staff member? I have the time, would you need the help?

I am sure I will need some staff members I will keep you in mind, ok guys, whats the T1 going to cost me and other equipment??

Youll need better then a T1 if you want to compete. Youll need an insane connection, etc. etc. I suggest you do colo. You simply will not be able to compete, or offer a good service withought spending a insane amount of money. But good luck to you!

Co-location is the way to go. Building a DC is not going to be a cost effective way of doing business at this time.

Co-locate your servers now and when you grow more, you can always have your own DC.