Looking to host...

I am looking at hosting a large number of existing websites some of which are produce a great deal of traffic. Obtaining customers is not an issue because there is already a good customer base.

My question is directed to people in the industry who are directly involved in hosting that may be able to provide some helpful hints.

Information I am looking for is related to hardware configurations and network layout.

For example, capacity if servers, number of servers, types of servers.. best practice scenarios for fault tolerance and load balancing would be fantastic if anyone has the knowledge or resources that I can read.

They will need to run on an IIS server, so I am also looking for things like control panel options, statistics as well, but that is not as important at the moment. Open source products like Linux, Apache, PHP are not really an option at this stage, but could be considered in the future as things expand.

Thanks in advance.

Dirk

If anyone is still thinking about this message before they reply ;-)

Heres what it needs

Approximately 300 sites
Email
Webservers
SQL servers

Architecture and information on solutions would be great, relating to redundancy etc.

Thanks

Is someone able to move my post to the web hosting forum, i just realised i posted in the wrong place.. DOh