
Where do you colo your servers? - Sam_Odio

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e1ven
It depends on the level of reliability that you need, and the level of
control...

At the company I work for, we lease space in datacenteres in a few spots
around the country. [1]

The thing is, we do this because we have specific hardware requirements which
require that we use our own hardware, and ensure we can't use anyone else's
stuff very easily. The problem is, we pay through the NOSE for it.

IMO, the optimal choice for most startups right now is to have _very_ few
servers (if any) that their run in-house, and to host the rest with other
people.

There's a couple of reasons for this- The first is reliaiblity. Hosting
companies have trained staff watching over the servers, and monitoring for a
failure. While you might do a lot to watch for failures [2], you'd save sleep
and sanity if you only needed to monitor for logic failures, and had someone
else (the hosting co) helping watch for hardware problems.

The second major reason is Bandwidth! Getting quality, symetric bandwidth run
to your door costs a LOT of money.. SpeakEasy DSL can get you started [3],
you'll struggle to get anything higher that a 6.0/1Mbit line- For hosting, you
need LOTS of upload- That 1Mbit will get taxed out quickly.

Take a look at Bandwidth offerings by Colos- Often you get Royally screwed,
when compared to renting a dedicated server from them. Companies like
ServerMatrix will give you 1.5 TB of monthly bandwidth for under $100....
That'd cost hunderds for the bandwidth alone in most colos.

The dedicated server places tend to assume you won't fully use the line, so
they oversell- That's how you can get th e great deals on bandwidth.. The nice
part is that if you go with a at least semi-reputable place (servermatrix,
rackspace, etc) they have MORE than enough to cover you, even if they'll a
littel annoyed that you use it all ;)

Read your TOS carefully.

Amazon's EC2 program is amoung the best for hosting, if you can get into it.
It allows you to dynamically scale up the number of servers, and has very
decent prices. This is among the best options for a startup because you can
load balance to handle spikes in traffic, such as Digg, Techcrunch or
Slashdot.

One other point I'll briefly touch on is depreciation of assets- If you buy
your own servers, and add them to a colo, when they get old, you lose a lot of
the initial value. You're often not going to want to keep the old servers in
the farm, once they're so low they'll do more harm than good. With renting
servers, along with the additional bandwidth and uptime, you get the advantage
of being able to just say "I'm done with these servers.", and lose nothing.

-Colin

[1] I can't actually tell you the places for confidentiality reasons, but it's
not important for this discussion anyway.

[2] Nagios Alerts to the Cellphone are a good start..

[3] Chosen because of good TOS, and reputation, but with the Bestbuy deal, be
on your guard here. The situation could change quickly.

------
Sam_Odio
Just wondering, for those of you running your own servers, where do you keep
them?

I started out with my boxes in my dorm room, under my bed :) Kept the bed
warm, and I appreciated the "white noise," but reliability left something to
be desired.

Any other stories? Does anyone know of a cheap colo in Boston/SanFran that
will rent you 1U at a time?

~~~
randallsquared
I've had a box at Serverbeach for a few years, and they've been very reliable,
and are pretty cheap. There's been a single issue I was unhappy about, which
was a mandatory IP change for my box due to a reconfiguration of their network
(after they were bought by peer1, a fiber/bandwidth company).

All else has been nigh on perfect. They do expect that you'll handle
everything yourself that can be handled remotely, though I wouldn't think that
was a problem in this crowd. :)

Edit: Er, and if you do choose to go with them, email me for a discount code
if you want one.

~~~
Sam_Odio
Cool - my brother uses Serverbeach and I've heard good things from him as
well.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, Steve from Reddit.com was saying they've had a
good experience with Server City, which will rent out fractions of a cabinet.
I think they're based in Cambridge.

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semigeek
WebHostingTalk.com for all of your questions about where to host and with
whom. We use WebAir based in New York, I've got a direct line to the CEO whom
is always willing to help in a sticky situation. The only problem I've ever
had with them is during setup of our last system, they gave us the wrong speed
Xeons in our quad box, which was fixed within 30 minutes.

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jdavid_net
Just thought I would chime in here, from socialhelix.com

we are looking for a good deal too in the midwest, we are located in
Milwaukee, WI and it seems like chicago is cheaper than Milwaukee area
colocation services.

For now we are making use of a speakeasy 6/768 dsl line for our beta servers.

If barcampUSA panned out, we were going to offer our service to the public
earlier and we were looking at getting a dedicated colo for 1-2 servers, but
for now, our dsl is fine.

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mattculbreth
We're using <http://www.futurehosting.biz/> now for our VPS. This is just a
dev server though.

Go to <http://www.webhostingtalk.com/> and spend a couple hours there reading.
You'll find some sharp folks on our end of things, and also some vendors who
hang out and build their brand. Very helpful.

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aristus
NAP of the Americas in Miami. World-class facility. It houses one of the root
DNS nodes and also a lot of E911 equipment. Expen$ive but it's the only place
in the States with good ping times to both Europe and SA. They handled the
2004-5 hurricane season with no downtime. It takes some cojones to put a
datacenter 100 meters from the ocean.

~~~
edgeztv
It takes even more cojones to host your applications there ;)

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tritchey
We use Rackspace for Paragent.com. They are a little more expensive, but they
handle all the os-level patching, backup, etc. We basically just worry about
the application. It lets us focus on the aspects of the business we are best
suited to handle, and leave the os-level management to people that devote a
lot more resources.

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henryw
I've used cari.net/complexdrive.com in san diego. They are pretty good.

~~~
phurfer
HA! cari.net/complexdrive.com has bad bandwidth quality and poor facilities.
aplus.net is also bad. And for the love of fnord avoid ADN. These are all poor
choices in San Diego. cari.net does have good prices though.

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jmclain
CI Host... Terrible... Probably going to switch.

~~~
patryn20
I feel your pain. Was a CI Host customer for YEARS and then left them. They
got BAD. An old company of mine still has a half-rack with them, but only
because of cross-connects in place we don't want to pay to move. We also put
gaming servers up there on occasion, since we are paying for it.

Took a lot of customers with me when I left. I couldn't afford to support them
on CI Host anymore. Too many problems. They pulled the power on our servers
without warning and pulled out the power backup to upgrade it (without
warning, mind you), then realized they didn't have a spare unit and left the
whole rack unplugged. Had to drive out there and fix it myself.

Moved my stuff to The Planet, but have had problems with them after the merger
with EV1. The support panel has slightly reduced functionality and some broken
pages. Their support team takes up to thirty minutes to respond to issues.
Just sad. It used to be great.

Colo4Dallas has pretty much non-responsive support teams. My employer is
moving our remaining servers out of there. Took them forty-five minutes to get
around to a down production box. That wasn't even to fix it, just to check it.

Have GREAT luck with Rackspace at work, but definitely more expensive. Very
responsive. Preemptive maintenance. Prompt notifications of hardware issues,
often before we notice them. IMMEDIATE support.

After they resolved some network instability issues, Sagonet was really good
for an old venture of mine. Good prices too.

Geez.....I feel like an unfaithful lover after listing off all these hosts I
have used. Probably even a couple more I can't remember.

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mattjaynes
In amazon's data centers! Go EC2 ;)

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zaidf
Softlayer. Pretty good service.

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pbreit
Mediatemple. Excellent.

~~~
Sam_Odio
Wamily.com actually switched off MT because of downtime & mysql problems.

MT will definitely be one of my first choices when they get all that sorted
out, though.

