Give me some opinions on setting up a server

My friend, who is sitting well $$-wise, told me he wanted to more or less setup a server. He said he would like to offer users above normal web space allocations as much as possible(he will buy 250gb drives by the handful). He said he would like to offer one individual a terrabyte of drive space if at all possible.

We're currently trying to research the fact of acquiring a business license or not......and would like to know monthly rates to charge, options to offer/include, and what you guys would like to see in a well-speced server for somebody who either has a decent amount of cash to throw around on toys, or wants to setup a decent account for their business.

Bare minimum, we'd like to AT LEAST see 1 250gb drive per customer.

He's got $$, I have the technical know how and professional like attitude for talking to people...please give us some guidance, I'm not well-versed in networking stuff.

First of all, how are you going to connect it to the net? A 250 GB hard drive doesn't do any good if you have a heavily capped upload rate from a broadband company.

T1...T5?

those are pretty high goals. Good luck just do alot of research thats deep man

Take a look at what the most successful hosting companies offer, and offer a bit more.
And make sure you keep the server up-to-date in security patches.

I know this one server (I'll post a link later when I have trillian runing) is in Texas runing over OCX 5 or something...

Well I mean, we'd start of sort of small to get started, but we wouldn't be like your or my "small time friend with server X that has average/minimal capapbilities." We don't want to start off real small obvoiusly because that's just bad, but we also don't need to start off with something that would satisfy Microsoft's needs for all their on-line work.

My friend just put $20k into the stock market..he's got $$. I don't know how much configuarion X would cost, or Configuration A would cost, but he wants to look into it, and I've been doing some research on it.

http://www.KcwHost.net <That link.

I wonder if 30 mg would do?
http://support.summersault.com/bandwidth_chart.html

How much bandwidth do you actually need to run a server? I'm quite curious myself.

>>How much bandwidth do you actually need to run a server?
That depends on the traffic you get. If you don't have many visitors, a cable or DSL could be enough. If you start having a lot of visitors you might have to move to a fiber-optic line with specialised hardware.

>I wonder if 30 mg would do?
If you're talking about bandwidth, hell no. My site has relatively few visitors, but some (medium-size) downloads, and so far this month, I've used about 300MB of bandwidth.
And if you're talking about space, maybe. It depends on how many downloads you expect to have on your site.

You should really talk to your local phone company and discuss bandwidth issues/costs. A T1 alone is going to cost you ~$600 USD minimum/month.

I would also make sure that you are going to have customers that NEED that much webspace... because honestly that's a sick amount of space and I'd only expect large corporations to use something like that for off-site backups. But I don't know who you're targeting either.

And like others have said... most hosting plans available are only offering 20 Gb of traffic.... and you want to allow space that is 12.5 times that??? You REALLY need to talk to a professional about this... not asking a message board about it. This suggests a lack of a grasp on what you're getting yourself into. Your friend with 20 grand in his pocket is going to be very broke very shortly unless you know what you're doing. I'd imagine your starting capital on something like this should be in the range of at least a half a million.

Thanks for all of the suggestions, I'm still reading the discussion as it's going on and you're all raising some interesting points.

We'll look into it some more.

250gigs per person is way to much. who on earth would need that? (apart from warez/mp3/divx hosters)your going to end up with terabytes of wasted space. you'll also need a damn speedy line to get that through every month. server maintenance will also be a proper pain. you should start out low profile, like a regular host, and then expand