Network cables - make them or buy them
First of all, I must say I've never had a problems with making cables by myself, last years stopped using cable testers just because they always say the cable I've made is ok.
But I see there's a lot of the factory-made cables on the market, they became cheap and in addition you may choose any color for the better management. Some people say the factory made cable is always better than you may do.
As there could be couple of the different situations, let's split a question:
buy or make a cables for the networking inside a rack?
buy or make for the networking outside i.e. to users' computers, to other racks etc.?
Solution 1:
Personally I would always buy cables and always do buy cables in large volumes.
The reason for this is that unless you are making cables for home you are making cables for a business. It takes time to make cables and you are paying people/you are being paid by the organisation you are working for. Unless you are making them in very large quantities the amount you save from making cables yourself does not cover time cost of the time taken to make the cables.
Also as you said you can buy multiple colours and most lengths, failing that there are companies out there who will make you any length of cable you want cost effectively.
Hope this helps.
Solution 2:
I can not make cables at a rate fast enough to compete with the prices from MonoPrice or Ziotek.
The only exception I make is for cables that are particular long, that have to pulled through conduit or holes without connectors on them, or when exact size matters. In that case, I do my best to borrow a appropriate cable testing hardware to test my work.
Solution 3:
My preferred method is to keep a stock of premade cables on hand (in a couple standard lengths), but always have a spool of wire and a box of plugs as well so I can make longer or custom-sized cables on demand (or if I run out of the premade ones).
Solution 4:
It just doesn't make sense to me to make cables. You save some money on the materials, but you quickly surpass any savings with labor.
You also probably aren't going to test and certify every cable that you make, meaning that it could turn into a hidden little problem in the future. I'm a big supporter of having quality cabling. After all, if layer 1 is unstable, the entire stack falls apart.
Solution 5:
We buy all of ours. The cases when a selection of 6' and 15' cables can't fill a need are very, very few, and we'll crimp in those cases. I asked our Telecom people about this and their answer was:
We used to crimp all of our drop-cables ourselves. But we found that buying pre-made cables saved us a lot of time, especially when we're doing big areas. Also, we haven't had a problem with quality, and GigE is more sensitive to a bad crimp than 100Mb. So we just get off the shelf.
This is greatly helped by the fact that we don't have to run drop cables from the network rack to the server racks, we have sub-floor jacks positioned next to the server racks. THOSE cables are cut to length, of course. Because of this 7' and 15' cables work for the vast majority of our equipment-wiring needs.
I don't know what they do out in end-user-land. They probably have a wider selection of pre-made.