[chiph]

We were hosted at Exodus in the Herndon Virginia area around this same timeframe. The staff gave us a small tour and showed us a cage about the size of a double-wide trailer. Inside were two Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and a whole wall of drive arrays. Plus networking gear, tape drives, etc. Easily $7-8 million worth of stuff.

They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altavista.

We didn't own our Compaq servers - we leased them from Exodus, like a lot of firms. And when the bubble popped, all those startups stopped paying for all that expensive equipment (which was now used and worth much less), and Exodus was on the hook as the owner of it all. Killed them.

Edit: Found this image from someone who picked one up for a song to add to their collection. From a prized million-dollar enterprise-class server, to being hauled around in the back of a pickup truck.

http://imgur.com/a/lXvOk

[nokahn]

I think all colos say crap like that. During a tour at switch, they pointed to a large cage and said, "It's a search engine that you all have heard about but I cannot name."

A week later, in Atlanta at QTS metro, they said almost the exact same words.

[grkvlt]

If it really was a large search engine, then I imagine they would be hosted at multiple locations, so not surprising that they were mentioned at both places?

[drewg123]

Hmmm.. I'm pretty sure AltaVista ran on DEC Alpha hardware, not Sun. And Google used self-built high-density racks of Intel hardware.

Maybe it was Inktomi? I'm pretty sure they used Sun hardware.

[rsync]

"Hmmm.. I'm pretty sure AltaVista ran on DEC Alpha hardware, not Sun."

Yes, they did. Remember - the original URL for altavista was: altavista.digital.com.

[chiph]

I don't think we knew about Inktomi at the time, but it certainly was a possibility. Our other guess was Ask Jeeves, since we didn't think that Excite had the money for that kind of hardware. But who knows, maybe Exodus floated the bill for that too.