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by joelm
953 days ago
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What are your goals? If budget is a factor, there are local/regional providers you can find good deals with. E.g. I've had good experiences with https://www.opticfusion.com/ in Seattle. If low-latency across the US is a factor then...doing that with one will be sub-optimal, however I'd either start in a specific market you want to chase (e.g. LA or NYC), or go more central like Chicago. If connectivity flexibility and peering are key for you then you might consider locating in a "carrier hotel". The best locations for those vary by geography (e.g. in Chicago that would be at Equinix, but in LA it's Coresite). You'll pay more, but can readily access the peering exchange. |
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Location is clearly important. Where do you want your datacenter(s) and do you want all locations managed by the same company or different companies.
Electrical reliability: some sites are fed from multiple substations, have a well maintained battery room, redundant generators, well tested transfer switches... and some don't. Automatic transfer switches tend to be a SPoF though, and a major provider, doing everything right, is likely to have an outage at one of their facilities due to a transfer switch failure once every 3-10 years, and afterwards, there will be an unavoidable scheduled maintenance to replace it (unless it had to be replaced during the outage). Maybe there's a new way to install transfer switches redundantly though?
HVAC reliability: HVAC needs electricity too, so see the previous one, but servers don't like to be hot, what are their plans for when HVAC equipment fails.
Network reliability: if you're at a carrier neutral site, you'll get fiber to your rack from your upstreams and then it's all up to you or them. If your provider is your transit, do they deliver redundant connections (lacp), do they run redundant connections all the way to their border router, redundant connections to their upstreams, do they have multiple upstreams, will they pull fiber from an upstream carrier to your rack. Do they participate in the local peering exchange? Also, have a capacity in mind.
Remote hands / physical access is important. If you have a lockable rack, do all the racks have the same key? IPMI can avoid a lot of physical time on the machines, but not all of it.
In addition to all of these, there's a what they say, and what's actually the case, and if they'll let you inspect / audit.
There's no wrong answers on these, I have my personal hosting at a facility with probably wishy washy answers to everything and I have low trust, but it's cheap and I don't need nine nines. Other people need all the reliability. Or something in between.