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Is there a place in this century for small data center providers?
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9 points
by im_so_dumb
909 days ago
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Hi HN ! I work for a small data center services provider in a developing country.
We manage 4 sites with capacity for 2k racks, all in the same country. Lately all I can hear is how cool AWS, GCP, Azure or even Digital Ocean are, and we can't figure if we would ever provide any service other that colocation services. Do you guys know any data center service that a small data center provider could offer (other than colocation) while not being completely overtaken by the big guys above? If you guys have any experience that you could share It would be cool :-) |
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Started in the web hosting space 20 years ago, back then it was just managed hosting, then virtualization, and eventually we built DigitalOcean as a product business offering cloud computing (though the initial iteration was more of a VPS with grander visions).
I don't think there is anything wrong with being in the colocation space. Instead of assuming you are in the wrong space, maybe ask yourself why it may be the right space. In order to compete with AWS and DigitalOcean you will need a bunch of programming and a decade to build out a fully featured cloud (Maybe you could do it in 5 years).
But personally I think the datacenter space is fantastic. And if you look at what has happened in the datacenter space in mature markets like the US there is a ton of consolidation. And any provider that sets up a decent datacenter from the concrete foundation up gets acquired for a rather sizable return.
You could join the race that everyone else is in (Cloud, AI, etc.), or you can look into becoming a large datacenter provider in your developing country. Because that is significantly harder in other aspects (physical construction vs virtual), but at the same time also quite lucrative. Just look at Equinix. They certainly aren't doing poorly at all.
And btw, it's easy to see other people's success and think that you should be further ahead, but I just wanted to say that we all start at 0 and then go to 1 before we can get to 1,000 and beyond and so congrats on building a business from scratch that looks like it's doing well.