Originally Posted by jimb

IPs are an upsale for hosting companies. In todays terms many hosting companies try and undercut each other and sell incredible, fully managed dedicated servers for SUB $100 Per Month. I have seen companies offer FULL 100MBPS Unmetered Servers, Dual Xeon 2.8ghz, 1 gig Ram, 1x300gig SATA HDD for $199/month. FULLY MANAGED!!!!! How can a company profit there? Well, charging $XX amount per month for IPs, Monitoring, "off hours time". Not to mention they are in Ghetto Colo's anyway. Some maybe running off Verizon Fios or DSL in a basement somewhere

There is no way for a hosting company to profit there. Now, build someone a decent server (decent as in 2.4ghz p4, 1 gig ram, 80-150gig HDD, 1000 gig bandwidth) for $100-$120 per month with IP's as needed (per ARIN rules) and you tend to make a decent profit off of the initial sale. You don't need to "nickle-n-dime" your customers. Customers hate that.

You also don't need to be greedy. Something that hosting companies tend to get. I co-founded Tear2 as a second hosting company (my first one I founded in 1997 and sold in 2000) for the basic reason that hosting companies nowadays are too bent on over-charging, nick-n-diming, and flat out scamming their customers. I am a strong advocate for providing a good service thats decently priced (not under or over priced) and just being nice to people. Growing a business like that tends to lead happier clients, which leads to more clients

Jim