Offering the same services is not the hard part. The difficulty is in offering the same services at a competitive price point and still be profitable. That is where the testing comes in. We are testing to see how efficient and reliable we can be at or below the average market pricing for hosted solutions.
We did that early on....never found a way for it to be profitable and worth our time.
*Microsoft SPLA (licensing required if you resell services from their products...such as hosted exchange) is expensive. I know lots of IT guys just whip out their MAPS or technet licensing..which is really NFR..and do it like that..but that approach is illegal.
*Hardware...maintain servers...redundancy is also common sense...ability to grow as needed.
*Maintain replacement cycle with this hardware...keeping within warranty, keeping spare parts
*Maintain redundant internet connection...primary one being high SLA
*Maintain backup generator
*Maintain multiple backup locations in case of primary one going down...MX2, MX3...similar equipment at those locations to spool up when primary is down
*Disaster recovery/business continuity backup setup
*Antivirus licensing per mailbox
*Spam filtering, quarantine, etc
Couple of other things I can add to the list as I remember them..but if you want to do things properly..above board (legal)...no mickey mouse setup...you have at least those to deal with. It's some serious out of pocket cost. And time you spend maintaining your equipment which gets added to that (because most of us consider our time to be money).
With todays packages avail through the big guys like RackSpace or AppRiver...at substantially less prices that you can come up with doing this on your own....it's just crazy to try to whip it up yourself.
