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The Internet

Best Places to Co-Locate? 30

Posted by Cliff from the where-do-I-connect-this-thing? dept.
Stephen wrote in a while ago with this question: "Where's the best place to co-locate my Linux box in California? I heard there are loads of server farms in the San Fran to the L.A area. Which one is the best and most cost effective? Well most of us will agree that the Internet is much larger than California, so lets open this up a bit: What are the best places to co-locate ANYWHERE
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Best Places to Co-Locate? More

Best Places to Co-Locate?

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  • Depends on how much you want to spend.. If you're a big spender, I would look at exodus. They are EXTREEMLY professional about their services; they also house [so they claim] 60% of the big sites on the web. They listed a bunch for me. Out in Massachusetts, they charge $1400 bux for 1MB sustained for a month. Includes 1/4 rack/24 hour keycard access, 24 hour monitoring. Bullet proof windows included. :) The datacenter out here has 3 clear channel lines running into it plus something like seven ATM T3's? One other intersting perk of exodus is you can shove as MUCH stuff in your 1/4 rack (or however much you buy) as you want. So you can shove a CSU/DSU+router in your rack, and run a T1 to your company HQ; and only pay for telco charges.

    I would suggest you stay AWAY from verio though. They are bad news.
  • AAh!. I hate to do this, but stay away from exodus at all costs. Exodus has yet to figure out how to run and manage a big IP network. They are down all the time, and have KILLED customers of theirs with shitty performance. (my personal experiance)

    Look at staying with the big guys (UUnet, bbn/gte, etc) if you are looking to do more than host a shell box cheaply.

    Also check out level(3), and globalcenter. Both are willing to deal, and have excellent networks.

  • If your looking for the slick setup, check out http://www.above.net. I'm currently have 9 Linux boxes with Verio, they've been decent. With Verio it depends on how good the ISP was that Verio bought up.

    But above.net, hosting/colocates is all they do. Gotta like those multihomed OC-12s and only paying for the bandwidth you use...

  • Re:Places to CoLocate (Score:4)

    by yod@ ( 21039 ) on Wednesday May 12, 1999 @01:39PM (#1896735) Homepage
    Don't do Exodus. I work for a consulting firm, and have worked with Exodus through our clients. thier service isn't to par and thier facilities are lacking. Try www.level3.net, They are about a year old. They have 17 locations in the US and London. Level3 will be at 25 (or so) Gateways by year end. They are laying 532 strands of fiber for thier backbone with conduit space to multiply that by a factor of 10. (for those that don't know 4 fibre strands = OC192 = 192 T3's = 5376 T1's = 8,064 Mb/s) times this by 133 (532 strands /4) and you get 1,072,512 Mb/s or one Terabit/second backbone.. this will span all of the Major US Cities. When you colo there you get 2 100Mb ethernet jacks that you can do what you want with. (Exodus gives you 1 10Mb)The Facilities themselves are the Best I have ever seen Clean and well thought out. 16" raised floors with AC running through the floor and all wiring is handled by a double decker wire ladder 1 for power 1 for data.. You get 2 15amp power strips on separate breakers. 1 Full Rack (23" racks X 7' tall) and 1Mb of bwidth (average monthly you can burst to the full potential of 100Mb/s) runs about $1,500/mo and I think aditional meg is like $800. The company was started by the people who started MFS (Mae West/East before MCI bought them)

    sorry for the rant, but we have 5 Racks there and it's been the best Datacenter Ive ever worked with.

  • I've toured the above.net facility before (which is right above MAE-WEST in downtown San Jose (probably where HE.net is located)) and they house large, large players. Heard of RealNetworks? Heard of Hotmail? :-) There are large hosting companies in there too who simply resell their bandwidth.

    We're about to put 3 machines at above.net and while its expensive, the company is top notch. Their San Jose and Washington, D.C. facilities are both ISO9002 certified, and I think they have enough backup/generator power to stay online for 6 days if power goes out.

    Basically, if Armageddon hits, Above.net will be the last bastion of Internet connectivity. :)

    Oh, and their 9.8Gb/s of bandwidth with 270+ peering relationships doesn't hurt their availability either.

    Last thing, their network statistics are online 24/7 in realtime. If you've ever used MRTG, their CTO Dave Rand helped write it. No secrets, 100% honest and 100% awesome service.

    -brian // www.vfive.com
  • Anybody have any experience with 9netave.com? They seem pretty large, and they certainly can afford a substantial advertising budget. But the price is REALLY low. I mean, they hit $130 a month including hardware, hosting, and 5 GB of transfer (which is all my site needs), with an up-front of like $400. There was another one that had been advertising on /. a bit about their $150/month linux special too that looked pretty reasonable.
    We're looking for our own server that really only needs to do 100-150MB a day of throughput and run some server apps, so I'm hoping to keep things under $200. Any advice?
    Thanks!
    --JZ

  • DSL? (Score:1)

    by Micah ( 278 )
    I've been looking at this for a while too, and it seems that DSL may be an option for low end-mid level servers. You pay like $100/month for 100-200kbits/s, vs $400 and up for similar co-lo. Plus, you get the added benefit of having the server in your home or office.

    What do you all think? Is this a valid option or would I be nuts to consider it? My system will run a Web server and an E-mail server with a LOT of users (probably over 1000 eventually).
  • Some apartments offer seeminly cheap Internet hookups (anyone have a nationwide list?). I know of one in Austin that offers a T1 for $75/month. Would this be a good co-lo bet?
  • I work for a fairly busy site that co-los at Frontier. They are intelligent and responsive, good connectivity, quick at diagnosing and fixing routing issues, and clear and honest about problems. We used to be at Exodus, nice lab coats but otherwise a bunch of air-heads. We regularly get queries from companies planning to leave Exodus looking for advice, it amazes me that they have not fixed the problems we were experiencing.
  • My company has had a great experience with Above.Net. They've easily handled our growth from 2 computers/1Mb/s to 30 computers/15Mb/s easily. Search for an article on them in the PC Week archives.
  • Just a word about 9netave; I have heard from many 9netave customers who have been really unhappy with their support. To the extent that I mentioned this to a customer of ours, and he laughed and said, "They don't have poor support, they have no support."

    I'm extremely happy with lightlink [lightlink.com], our local co-location provider, just 3 minutes walk up the hill. We get a 4'x2'x2' locked box, 3 IPs on a fast T1, 24 hour card access, and a bunch of freebies, for $250/mo. plus $10/gig.
  • Read the scpecs carefull before going the DSL

    DSL like those 56k bit modems isn't full duplex. The speed is faster downloading than uploading.

    Bell atlantic offers a "Bussiness DSL" with speeds up to 7.1 MBS downstream and 680 kbps upstream> (Thats top of the line, ie the most $$). All the others programs offer 90 kbps upstream.

    Also you get "dropped" at the phone company switching station, where you tie in to one of a few"approvd" ISPs.

    It seems faster than ISDN (128 kbps) though.
  • Also, with DSL there's almost no comitted information rate. I think the CIR for a 256k line is 10k. (at least here in oregon)
  • Is there anywhere in the UK that's reliable for co-location, outside of London? UK prices for least lines are worse than the US so I find it hard to believe tht no one has taken the initiative? Perhaps I should get a consortium together to set something up in the Manchester(Norht West) area?

  • VIIS (Score:1)

    by prolix ( 34172 )
    A little bit about VIIS (http://www.viis.net)

    The Frontier GlobalCenter facility in Sunnyvale is generally regarded as one of the very best facilities in the world (that's why Yahoo and many other big-name sites co-locate there). The bandwidth is clean, and the facility is superb. However, it has been the experience of many smaller companies that they have a tendency to pay more attention to the larger clients... as far as I know, they're not even setting up new accounts at less than 2mbps.

    One of the things that we offer is server co-location in this facility in our own private server farm. You'll get the same quality of network services (ie; bandwidth, availability, and power redundancy) without the cost of a 2mbps connection and the rental of a rack. Typically, you'd end up paying upwards of $2000 for simple co-lo in Sunnyvale. Because we buy in bulk, and manage our space and connectivity ourselves, we can offer co-location for much, much less.

    You can also get actual rack space from us at discounted rates, and run a T-1 off it like Exodus (someone mentioned that in a post here too..)

    But what we really pride ourselves on is the level of personal attention and caring we give to our customers. We are always here to help our customers grow and become successful.

    By the way, someone mentioned Verio.... I also suggest you stay away from them. Their network management philosophy leaves something to be desired. We've had quite a few customers from Verio tell us how horrible their customer service is as well (ie; I don't have a phone number to call, and I don't know the name of my rep!).

    Feel free to drop me a note if you'd like more information...


  • Just in case anyone feels like saying hi!

    Grant

  • Gack, before you give advice please do some research. Just because the major consumer-oriented DSL is assymetric, that doesn't mean it *has* to be. You're thinking about ADSL, many companies also offer SDSL (also called plain "DSL") which is symmetric. Here in Boston you can get SDSL at rates of 1.5Mbps (symmetric) and possibly even higher.

  • yahoo (Score:1)

    by gavinhall ( 33 )
    Posted by d106ene5:

    yahoo does not have 1100 web servers.
    yahoo has servers with many co-locations, not just frontier. they also use exodus and level 3.
  • I have had good experience running http://www.sashanet.com on a 256K ADSL line ( it is actually 272K up/ 640 K down) from US West in Provo, Utah. I pay $80 a month for the line + ISP with a block of 8 IP addresses (5 user-assignable). The only complaint I have is occasional high latency and outages averaging about an hour per month. They have been improving lately, though. My nighlty off-site backups go at 25-27 Kbytes/s. Once a friend of mine needed a place of a temporary location of his banner exchange server getting hit 1-2 times per second, and I allowed him to do it on my line. I could still get to my site without a noticable delay :) Anyway, if your teleco is US West, and you need tips on setting up your DSL, feel free to e-mail mailto:sasha@direct1.com
  • Exodus' service isn't up-to-par? Facilities are lacking?

    In whose alternate universe? They are expense, yes. But their service is as good as anyone's, and there is nothing wrong with Exodus facilities.

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