This question is probably for those who sell VPS/dedicated server solutions, have their own rack(s) and/or run a datacenter and offer such a service. It would also be of high value for those members who are thinking of expanding their business, but are looking for best suppliers of servers and server parts.

Where do you buy your equipment (processors, memory, servers, networking equipment, storage, etc)? And do you prefer to build servers yourself or do you purchase them pre-build?

I'm from India with company registered in Singapore and having most of the servers in US.

For low end servers i usually rent dedicated servers, but for high end servers i just pay to my NOC to buy the hardware for me and then i just pay for co-location charges

I usually build server myself, buy parts from a number of suppliers including Insight, Dell, eBuyer to name a few.

Check out Dave @ gopcn.com for a great supermicro provider. They are based out of San Diego, I've personally been buying from him for over 15 years and highly recommend them.

When we housed at a datacenter, we used to buy our equipment through them and piggyback on their orders to their larger suppliers to get the lowest priced deals.

We've purchased through supermicro dealers (that's nearly 15 years ago now), and had great experiences, but we always purchased fully built machines that had run through a burn-in time so that we could just plug-in and run. There's few things more frustrating than assembling things, running the burn-in and areas failing and having to wait on new parts.

Just reinforcing what bigredseo said - I used to run an RMA department for a networking firm and it's amazing how much hardware fails right out of the box.

We build our own servers from mostly Supermicro components. We usually order from superbiiz.com as they have good prices and are close enough (northern CA) that their standard shipping will get us parts next day.

We usually shop around for hard drives to find the lowest price. Superbiiz has been among the lowest cost vendors the past couple of times I've shopped around.

Occasionally we will check eBay for equipment that is one generation old.

I usually build them myself, however do get stumped sometimes, much less now, then when I first started, however go with an organization that offers good support. Just incase I need it.

We've bought through three methods.

- Buying Supermicro built gear from RackmountsEtc (not much though).

- Buying bulk on corporate pricing directly through our Dell account manager.

- When we expanded in to the UK, we were able to order through the DC we are using as they had access to good pricing through their own account.

Different things work for different people. It really depends on what you want. I've known people buy old servers on eBay and colo them to sell them. About 7 or 8 years ago when I had my own business, I bought ~80 servers being cleared out by JaguarPC at the time and had them driven up to Chicago for colo. They were cheap to buy, the colo was well negotiated and we easily sold them. It was old stuff, but people still wanted it.

I bought all my Supermicro servers at gopcn.com. Dave is great man and I never have any single issue with any of my servers.

We buy Direct from HP now days.

Having a good relationship with a sales person where you buy from does wonder for pricing!

Servers:
I've had great luck on ebay, if I know exactly what I want. You can find some very good HP Proliant servers on there, both newer stuff and older stuff.

RAM:
I've been happy to buy new items off of ebay with it comes to RAM, but I do not buy used RAM if it can be avoided, unless I plan to test it myself extensively. There's nothing wrong with equipment that somebody else has used, so long as you ensure that it will not cause any issues by you using it.

HDD:
Amazon and ebay have been good to me here as well, but I also will go to Microcenter if the price is right. The majority of the drives I buy are HGST 2TB HDDs, but I buy the occasional Silicon Power SSD or Corsair SSD from Amazon.


Note on used or refurbished items:
I've received items that were DOA when new, and I've had refurbs that outlasted some new items. So I tend to use battle-tested equipment when it comes to my own stuff. However, depending on the clients needs, sometimes the benefit of a support contract are worth it.

Sometimes we just go to eBay and it's very likely to find some nice deals.

Most of the time we go with our vendors and request for a quote, so our hardware vendors build the systems for us and ship to our DC.

We are a huge fan of superbiiz.com for all Supermicro needs, its one of the cheapest vendors around usually as well. Having an account manage there helps as well as he finds discounts where he can and makes ordering things quicker.

Dave at gopcn is where we buy our servers. I have used others in the past and so far gopcn is preferred vendor of choice.