[cd34]

Many ways to do it:

There are dozens of guys reselling Servermatrix/Rackshack and then doing the management. I know of one company that charges $50/month for management and doesn't have any of the headaches of rebilling the machines. Rough estimate, they buy the server for $99, mark it up to $199, do the management. Pretty simple math. 100 machines = $10k/month gross profit.

You could colocate machines at an existing provider. Depending on their response to failures/reboot requests, and your access to the machines, you could build a small provider fairly well.

You could rent a rack and buy bandwidth and do your own maintenance/troubleshooting.

Or, you could find some space, bring connections in, ramp up the building with generator power and batteries, etc.

If you were wanting to just get the thing rolling, 1x annual gross is the current multiplier for purchasing webhosting facilities. .6x annual on virtuals. You could buy an existing provider. Careful with that though, sometimes the guys selling believe you should also buy out the equipment lease that they got. They traded tommorows income for today dollars.

With today's economy, and the glut of Carrier/Class A colo space available, I haven't seen a very compelling reason to build a data center today. Regardless of what the facility says, make sure you are close enough to perform maintenance if you need to.

One of the more expensive facilities around us cut their prices in half to get me to talk to them -- that's before I picked up the phone. There are carrier/colo hotels all around the place -- I would assume at least a few in Phoenix.

Good luck with it.