[davidw]

> It is probably going to be almost impossible to have a "carrier neutral" hotel in rural Oregon

Fair enough, but there's plenty of middle ground between Prineville and the Bay Area. The latter is expensive - it makes sense to have the really high-end things there, like Google R&D, not commodities like data centers and factories.

IMO. I'm certainly not an expert in that sort of thing though.

Incidentally, as a native of Oregon, I still think it's pretty funny that Facebook is building a center in Prineville, heretofore best known as the home of Les Schwab "Free Beef!" Tires.

[scalyweb]

Definitely I agree. But some clients will pay more for proximity such as monitoring or DNS providers. Chicago(350 Cermak) and NY are an example because of the financial trading markets. Clients pay "through the nose" for a colo spot there because every millisecond counts. If XYZ Trading Company sets up in the suburbs of Chicago, that 5milliseconds makes a huge difference.

But you are definitely right that most people don't need that kind of silliness.

I came from North Carolina where Google and Apple saw the lower power/employee costs as a reason to open datacenters. In the western part of the state is a beautiful city called Asheville which was never known as a network hub. But because of the geographic location halfway between Atlanta and DC a company(uberbandwidth.com/netriplex) decided to create a datacenter there. Lower costs...but the only way IN and OUT of their network was a backhaul through Atlanta or through DC. If one of those backhaul lines go down they've basically lost their single selling point.

[davidw]

Sure, I understand about the financial companies, but, going back to HE, that's definitely not the business they're in: they'd be in SF proper if they wanted to be close to that world.