Ask YC: Colocation?

[reidman]

Anyone have recommendations/information for US colocation outside of California or the east coast?

A resource which plots backbone servers and major datacenters on a geographical map would be especially helpful. The only two half-decent (emphasis on 'half') resources we've found so far are:

http://www.colotraq.com http://www.datacentermap.com

It would be nice if there was a Google Maps mashup or something better than DataCenterMap, but apparently that is (was?) considered a part of our nation's obscurity plan: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23689-2003Jul7

[reidman]

Some additional info/clarification:

Several of us who are involved with the business are going to be moving, and it would be nice to know what kind of facilities will be nearby. The reason we're not looking at CA or east coast is purely preference, though I should note that Oregon/Washington are fair game.

For the record, we've been running on dedicated servers for almost 10 years now, and since we finally got around to making a business out of it we're looking at our upgrade options.

[iigs]

That Washington Post article is excellent. It's too bad the student undertook it so close after 9/11... it would have probably been much better received, and perhaps even productized, today. I suspect he could tell a lot of large corporations things about their exposure that they didn't know.

On the topic of hosting, you don't say why you're not satisfied with the coasts, so I can't qualify my suggestions. Here are some unordered thoughts, perhaps they will send you the right direction:

1) Without doing a detailed analysis, I'd guess that Dallas is probably the best location to host a server outside of the Pacific/Eastern timezones. There are some very large colo centers (the infomart, http://www.infomartusa.com/ comes to mind) that resell space to large carriers/providers. Many providers peer with each other in these spaces, which is the internet equivalent of being at an intersection. Even if you don't colo at one of these centers ($$$) you're bound to reap the benefits from this, as your traffic will likely end up backhauled to a place like this anyway.

2) If you're talking about a decent amount of capacity (more than a couple rack-U or more than about a T1 of bandwidth) call a couple carriers and ask for maps. Sales often has maps / diagrams that are a little more detailed than the stuff you can find on carrier sites, and they'll generally be happy to give you some suggestions for spaces in the area that are served by their products (i.e. where they terminate).

3) Unless you're solving for a specific problem the variability of individual colo providers generally outweighs the differences in locations. That is to say, you'd be better served by a well run provider in your home city than a bunch of imbeciles 5ms from a PAIX peering point. Don't over-think the physical facility/location aspects.

[reidman]

"Don't over-think the physical facility/location aspects."

Excellent advice! And, incidentally, Dallas was one of the places I was looking at, so it's good to hear that it's well-connected.

[bjclark]

I used to be a customer of Data393 in Denver. Infact, there's quite a few good DC's in Denver. Data393 (data393.com) Via West (which has 2 more in SLC and 1 in Las Vegas) Internap (http://www.internap.com/contactus/seo/page964.html)

There is also ThePlanet in Dallas/Houston There is the DC in St. Louis that slicehost is in, I'm sure you could colo there, no idea the name.

There's ALOT of datacenters out there and most of them will deal on the cabinet level and up.

www.webhostingtalk.com is the best place for this stuff though.

[TheBosch]

I've been with GNAX / Net Depot for the last few years. You can co-locate there and the service has been rock solid apart from a lightning strike DIRECTLY on a transformer. But they have dual power inputs and gas backups on site. They're located in Atalanta.

http://gnax.com http://gnax.com/network.php#gold http://netdepot.com (send an e-mail and ask about colo as this is the dedicated renting site they run)

Also, if you're looking for more info check out the Colo forum on Web Hosting Talk:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=44

[mileszs]

http://nframe.com hosted Monster.com (or part of it), until they chose to open their own facility. Finish Line is a colo customer, ChaCha is a customer, as well as many others. It is located a couple miles north of Indianapolis.

nFrame is owned by Continental Broadband, who also owns Expedient data centers (Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland), as well as DCs in Chicago, and a few others. http://continentalbroadband.com

[raamdev]

I use LiquidWeb (http://liquidweb.com) for managed servers, although they also offer colocation. Their datacenter is entirely self-owned and their technical support is outstanding. They always have very helpful, very knowledgeable technical people on-hand, at any hour. They're located in Lansing, MI.

[davidw]

Why not just use something like linode?

[reidman]

We've been on dedicated servers for a long time, and we're at a point where cost-efficiency and flexibility are our two biggest factors.

We're expecting pretty linear growth, so scaling isn't a huge deal. Up until now we would regularly switch to a better server, stay there until we outgrew it, and then jump again. It's kept us relatively lean/current and our costs have stayed low as the cost/quality of hosting has changed (and we've gotten better at sniffing out good hosts).

Places like linode and slicehost would have been decent options in the past, but we serve 1-2 TB of data each month, so we like to have lots of bandwidth available. And while many dedicated servers offer that, our server admin is pretty picky about the hardware, so she'd like to be able to manage it on her own.

Out of curiosity, how easy is it to 'hook up' two separate Xen instances, assuming Xen is what slicehost and Linode run on? I'm not a server guy, but I actually share a slicehost plan (separate from this particular venture) with one of our fellow News.YC hackers, so I'm familiar with how excellent the company/service is. If they're really that easy to connect/scale then it might be worth the extra cost...

[mileszs]

There's a story about a site named FaceStat that was linked on the front page of Yahoo! one day, and had to spin up several Slicehost slices, complete with load balancing and all (or most) of the trimmings. Unfortunately, the admin's site is suspended by bluehost (or someone), and I don't remember the details. Here's a post by Slicehost that is related: http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2008/6/4/facestat-scales-f...

It is definitely possible to create a VPS-based system to replace your dedicated servers. In fact, that is the direction a lot of people are going, because it's relatively cheap to spin up a new VPS to scale horizontally, as opposed to purchasing a new server. Without knowing what your needs are in more detail, I couldn't say with any confidence whether Slicehost or Linode would work for you, or something else.

Do note that many traditional datacenters are starting to offer some sort of "cloud" solution, or at least some solution involving virtual machines that they have made sure involves the word "cloud", for the buzz factor. So, you could find a reliable colo facility, and work with them to migrate to a VPS-like solution.

[Kaizyn]

Xen is open source: http://www.xen.org/ Why not install it on a test box in house and decide for yourself how well it fits your needs?

[tialys]

You don't own the servers at Linode. Colocation is putting your server in someone's data center. This is good if you have a large number of custom servers, but don't want to manage the bandwidth, power, cooling etc... yourself.

[axod]

Of course then you do have to manage hardware failures.

[clint]

Unless you pay for your colocation provider to do it

[davidw]

Yeah, I know what colocation is, and am wondering why you would bother in this day and age. I could see it being worth your while if you were a big enough company to have a significant number of servers and the people to run them. But I really mean 'significant'. For most startups, being able to scale with something like linode seems more advantageous.

[olefoo]

In addition to custom hardware (like the crypto cards modoc mentions downthread) you also have to look at the potential liabilities you face. If you're involved in a HIPAA compliant environment, or one where you are storing large amounts of personal information, it may be a requirement that you have certain controls on physical access to the machinery and logical access to the data that are harder to guarantee with a VM Provider.

This isn't to say that a VM might not be perfectly acceptable for parts of your operation. But realistically, at this time if you look at the way most of the compliance documents for data security are written; you cannot be compliant in a suppliers shared virtualized environment.

[modoc]

There are some applications which benefit from custom setup hardware (cypto cards, extra NICs, etc...), you may want more network security than the single network or double homed boxes on simple public and private LANs (you may need isolated firewalled internal networks beyond what you can get from leased host providers). You also may want to drop in some of the various appliances out there for stats/analysis, spam/virus protection, google search boxes, etc...

[aaronblohowiak]

GPGPU!

[staunch]

If you're more concerned with quality than cost you can't go wrong with Equinix. They're carrier neutral and extremely well connected.

http://equinix.com/equinix/locations/map/northamerica/

[Tangurena]

I recently went on a "plant trip" to visit our local ViaWest datacenter. From memory, their facilities are mostly in CO, UT and TX. It looks like they want to sell managed hosting mostly, but they also have a lot of colocation.

[blender]

BlueLock:

http://bluelock.com/solutions/hosting/sharedhosting.html

They are in Indianapolis and Salt Lake City.

Cheers

[epi0Bauqu]

http://www.ilandinternet.com/

Resells level3 space on the cheap. Had great experiences with them in Boston, but they have data centers all over.

[mleonhard]

I don't think colocation is worth the hassle. Datacenter operations teams can manage hardware much more efficiently than any small company can.