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Hello, fellow colleagues.
We've been taking care of a larger colocation customer for the last few years and are evaluating whether it makes sense to pass them to another ISP. Why would we do this? Simply because they're operating in the lowest-cost market and are expecting prices we can (or want) no longer offer. And since NL is even worse than DE when it comes to pricing I thought I'd give it a shot. Here are the basics:
- 20 x 1U rackmount servers
- 180 x consumer midi-tower servers (18 cm W), mostly regular Celeron / P4 2-3 GHz systems with 1-2 HDDs including 15 Dual Xeons
- 500 Mbit/s data transfer (flat, capped port)
- Location, also geographically, is irrelevant. I guess even your basement would qualify if it has a decent UPS
- Customer expects remote hands (mostly hardware replacement followed by manual server reboots and troubleshooting (end-customer locked himself out of his server etc.)) to be free of charge or at least to be very low priced
- Customer expects response times in the range of minutes to few hours - you should have your own staff in the DC, everything else will probably not make sense
- All servers are connected to APC reboot switches, so manual reboots are cut down to a minimum
- Customer supplies switching infrastructure. ISP must offer tower shelves and cabling
Expected pricing exclusive of VAT:
- < 10-12 EUR per U / midi-tower incl. power (UPS) and air conditioning
- < 8 EUR per Mbit/s (capped port, customer upgrades 30-50 Mbit/s per month)
The challenge is not to match 10-12 / 8 EUR but to go even below this. Lowest price gets the best chances to win their business.
Customer is willing to commit for 600 Mbit/s right away and offers to commit to 800 Mbit/s until the end of the year. You can expect to get 10 new servers with every 20 Mbit/s they add. Customer uses what he pays for, so don't make offers based on a "mixed calculation". If they commit to 600 Mbit/s, they'll use exactly 600 Mbit/s, not less, not more. They'll take care of traffic shapping (capped port) themselves.
Expect 1-2 hours of remote hands (of which the customer expects you to only charge a very low percentage) per day.
Customer is willing to sign a agreement for 24 months. Customer pays promptly and constantly (via direct bank debit at this time, but this will not work for you Dutch guys since the customer is based in Germany).
What's in for us: we expect a one-time payment for passing the customer in the range of 6-8 months of monthly turnover (i.e. something in the range of 40.000 - 55.000 EUR). Payment can also be split to x EUR one-time and x EUR for the next 6-12 months.
This opportunity is definitely not for everyone, but could be interesting for ISPs looking to fill some capacity quickly.
If interested, reply with your contact data and some basic information about your company / DC here in this thread and I'll get in touch with the people that seem to qualify.
Regards,
Markus
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