Well someone looking to get a data centre probably has at least a few hundred servers worth of hosting already and so looking to purchase a significant fraction of someone else’s hosting would just result in it costing more because the people they buy it from would need to expand their data centre to hold all the additional servers and would want to make a profit for themselves on top of what the expansion would cost.
Suggesting that they get their hosting from someone else who may well have fewer servers than them in the first place is a rather meaningless and unhelpful suggestion. Obviously if they only needed a few dozen dedicated servers they would not be looking for their own data centre, they’d just use colocation to have them hosted in an existing data centre somewhere.
Probably your best bet is to wait a bit and pick up a datacenter from a company going out of business in this economic climate. I would also wonder why having an independent data center is so emportant–just about everyone short of fortune 500 companies is colocating lots of stuff these days, mainly because operating a first class datacenter is so expensive that it actually makes more sense to rent than own.
I believe that is why I said to search for reseller on ebay.
While a reseller account may be the way for most people looking to start a small scale hosting business, buying a reseller account from ebay is not entirely wise, if only for the huge number of providers with ridiculous, unsustainable offers, looking to make a quick buck.
A hobby site is the only thing that is acceptable to run on the infrastructure you suggested. If you step into commercial or business anything then suddenly the solution is 100% obsolete.
Even for companies grossing multi-millions of dollars it still usually doesn’t make sense for them to build their own data center. They usually simply lease space from an existing facility.
And I never said you should spend 10+ million a year to open a data center to run a web hosting business, I simply pointed out the reality of how much a datacenter actually costs. For small companies, leasing servers will usually be the most cost effective. As they grow, co-location will soon become their bread and butter for a very, very long time unless the company sees extraordinary growth (eg. Google).
Stereotypical “reseller” accounts are basically shared servers, and are only suitable for small side-businesses such as a Web Designer hosting local clients. Companies like Rackspace are looking to change this with their Mosso Cloud Sites offering, attempting to provide the same scalability as a larger scale solution for a shared price.
I’d have assumed that anyone looking at wanting their own data centre already has too many servers to make co-location a workable option. Presumably there would be hundreds of servers involved either running thousands of small web sites or a smaller number of really large web sites (although the latter would probably be more suited to having a few servers co-located in each of several dozen data centres rather than having all of them in the one place).
Your own data centre for less fewer than hundreds of servers would be the wrong solution in the first place since with fewer servers than that colocation in one or more existing data centres would be a much cheaper alternative as colocation would only cost perhaps a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year rather than millions.
You definitely need to move up through the various steps in the right order in order to get your hosting at the best price. For small sites you would probably start with shared hosting and if you want to sell to others you’d start with a reseller shared hosting. From there you’d grow to the point where you need a Virtual Private Server and then to needing a dedicated server of your own. You’d then grow to using several dedicated servers eventually switching to supplying the servers yourself and using co-location to have them in someone else’s data centre. Finally when you get to needing many dozens of servers where you have had to split them across several data centres because on one has the capacity to handle all your servers for you would you then start looking at establishing your own data centre.
Since Roosevelt mentions that he has clients such as Ipowerweb and ThePlanet, those clients would require significant numbers of servers each to run their business and a data centre would be the appropriate option since to handle that sort of capacity currently is probably using colocation in several different data centres and setting up their own data centre would allow them to move all of their hundreds of servers to the same place. A good starting point might be to actually talk to the people running the data centres where the servers are currently located in order to see what they can tell you. As they probably couldn’t handle all the extra load of bringing all your servers to their data centre they have nothing to lose by being as helpful as they can be with information since you’d probably want to keep at least some servers in a different location.