My thoughts on colocation? When choosing a data center, look at your neighbors. Mine were Dropbox, Netflix, Splunk, and Etsy. Best tools for finding a good data center: www.peeringdb.com, www.datacentermap.com.
For "finding datacenters", <i>traceroute</i> is useful. You can just pick some websites and see where they host. For example, is seems that pinboard.in is hosted at <a href="http://he.net/colocation.html" rel="nofollow">http://he.net/colocation.html</a>, Fremont 2, or at least that is where I am being routed.
I started out dedicated, and switched to colo about 8 years ago.<p>Not that I really need colo, could easily go cloud, back to dedicated, or even dirt cheap with some shared hosting provider for hosting needs, but I've always liked having my own customized setup in colo.<p>Here's why:<p>1) $50 per 1U (power included)<p>2) /27 IP range<p>3) 250GB monthly bandwidth<p>4) 24/7 DC tech support<p>Pretty basic setup, couple of Dell R610s with gigabyte switch and Cisco ASA. VMware ESXi runs on top of the bare metal, so basically have my own VPS environment.<p>It's a nice break from coding to learn a bit about the systems admin side of the fence, I like it ;-)<p>Of course, the times they are a changing, at some point I'm going to need to go Cloud. For now pretty content though...
At what price point does it make sense to go through this clearly painful process to colocate?<p>I feel like there's a logical progression from PaaS/VPS => Managed dedicated hosting => colo facility.<p>But I would love to know when the costs for these jumps make sense.
A few notes on power utilization:<p>My experience is that the 1-amp-per-rack-unit rule of thumb applies only if every server in the cabinet is under full load (CPU and all spinning disks). This is almost never the case, however: our average utilization is around 8 amps per phase on a 3-phase circuit. (Load limits are <i>per phase</i>, not total.)<p>You can also get 30-amp circuits in most data centers if you're concerned about it.<p>Keep in mind, too, that your load is usually balanced across 2 PDUs (assuming you're buying systems with redundant PSUs, which you should) and on 208-230V power, which is more efficient than 120V due to lower resistance. If you configure your systems correctly, the load will be shared across both PDUs under normal conditions. That said, you'll still need to ensure you don't overload the remaining circuit if redundancy is lost.<p>In summary, don't worry too much about overloading a 30A circuit; there are plenty of full cabinets in a DC for a reason.
Mark Maunder wrote a good blog post on colocation - <a href="http://markmaunder.com/2011/10/31/clouded-vision/" rel="nofollow">http://markmaunder.com/2011/10/31/clouded-vision/</a><p>As for the California earthquake risk, one option is to colocate your servers in Dallas or somewhere with no earthquake risk. The Maunder article talks about why colocation doesn't tie you geographically to that place.
I recently did the math with the help of a friend who uses Amazon AWS. I have three primary servers in a data center and by running them myself versus relying upon Amazon, I have saved my company about $5,000 per year, each year, over six years.
Something I find annoying is that Data Centers often figure that if they get you in, then you will be either unable or unwilling to move so the 'renewal' can be a lot larger than than the original contract. Equinex tried to take us from $108/kva to $450/kva on the renewal. I was like "Really? You don't think we'll move out with a > 4x gain in cost of staying?"
Hrm, why don't people just rent dedicated servers? For less than $100 a month these days you can get a 32GB server with SSDs. If your server dies, the provider needs to replace it... Seems like all win to me.
Bay Area colocation has been expensive since they started billing based on power, rather than physical space. I had a good thing going in the 90s to ~2005ish with a long term contract I signed giving me a full cabinet on a 100mbit unmetered line for ~$600/mo. When that contract expired it promptly jumped to ~$1500/mo.<p>I know that's not much space compared to the big boys, but it fit our needs at the time pretty well.<p>If you're looking for colocation stuff these days, and you're not huge and need to be in San Jose, I'd look at some of the spaces in Sacramento.<p>Other great spots around the country: Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, and in Virginia around MAE-East.
"The place of choice is an awful forum called WebHosting Talk."<p>I do not get that quote.<p>I have been a WHT member for years and in that time found dozens of excellent server and collocation providers.