Calling All Hosting Admins!

[proggR]

I've mentioned in previous posts that I'm seriously considering starting a small hosting company. I am a little lost on some things but am going to do more reading about it all to better understand and then setup a dummy server to test everything before I invest in a larger server or a business class internet package.

Would anyone recommend against using "normal" computer hardware as the server instead of investing in blades and chassis? The hardware wouldn't really be all that normal since I'm looking into dual quad-core systems with roughly 6TB or more of HDD space, plus RAID, and 32 GB of RAM. Each server would likely cost between $7000 and $10,000 with this configuration, so would it be better to invest in the blades and chassis for scalability or just keep buying these computers to use. I will be offering mainly VPS's and will easily be able to fit 20+ clients per server, running each virtual machine from a separate partition virtual under a "master" partition. I don't plan on going any higher than 100 clients but wouldn't turn them away if there was the interest. How do specs from blades compare to the ones I've given.

Another concern is the internet package I would need for the servers. Obviously upload speeds will need to be high, as well as a very high monthly bandwidth cap or none at all. I haven't had much luck finding out this information so any help here would be great. 

Also, if anyone has any references to material about setting up a nameserver and being able to access each of these virtual machines from it it would be great. I definitely don't have the know how to start it right away but its something I'm interested in investing time into learning.