Ask YC: Colocation?

Some additional info/clarification:<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>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:<p>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, <a href="http://www.infomartusa.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.infomartusa.com/</a> 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.<p>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).<p>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.

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 (<a href="http://www.internap.com/contactus/seo/page964.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.internap.com/contactus/seo/page964.html</a>)<p>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.<p>There's ALOT of datacenters out there and most of them will deal on the cabinet level and up.<p>www.webhostingtalk.com is the best place for this stuff though.

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.<p><a href="http://gnax.com" rel="nofollow">http://gnax.com</a> <a href="http://gnax.com/network.php#gold" rel="nofollow">http://gnax.com/network.php#gold</a> <a href="http://netdepot.com" rel="nofollow">http://netdepot.com</a> (send an e-mail and ask about colo as this is the dedicated renting site they run)<p>Also, if you're looking for more info check out the Colo forum on Web Hosting Talk:<p><a href="http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=44" rel="nofollow">http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=44</a>

<a href="http://nframe.com" rel="nofollow">http://nframe.com</a> 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.<p>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. <a href="http://continentalbroadband.com" rel="nofollow">http://continentalbroadband.com</a>

I use LiquidWeb (<a href="http://liquidweb.com" rel="nofollow">http://liquidweb.com</a>) 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.

Why not just use something like linode?

If you're more concerned with quality than cost you can't go wrong with Equinix. They're carrier neutral and extremely well connected.<p><a href="http://equinix.com/equinix/locations/map/northamerica/" rel="nofollow">http://equinix.com/equinix/locations/map/northamerica/</a>

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.

BlueLock:<p><a href="http://bluelock.com/solutions/hosting/sharedhosting.html" rel="nofollow">http://bluelock.com/solutions/hosting/sharedhosting.html</a><p>They are in Indianapolis and Salt Lake City.<p>Cheers

<a href="http://www.ilandinternet.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ilandinternet.com/</a><p>Resells level3 space on the cheap. Had great experiences with them in Boston, but they have data centers all over.

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