Slashdot Mirror
Exodus Files For Chapter 11 Protection
rit writes: "Albeit a bit expected, it is shocking to find that Exodus Communications has gone ahead and filed for bankruptcy. Exodus is one of the largest hosting facilities, and their major competitor, Above.net (owned by MetroMedia Fiber) is in pretty much the same boat ... circling the metaphorical drain of the dot-com world." Note that filing for protection from creditors while reorganizing is not the same as hanging up a big "closed" sign -- Exodus is still operating, and hopefully will be able to keep the LEDs turned on for a good long while (since Slashdot is hosted there).
damn... sungard is going to pick up all the business that these guys have...
... hi bingo
I've been inside an Exodus facility. If they'd spent a little less on decor and "Gee Whiz" security features, they might be in a little less trouble. Must admit though, the plasma LED and the palm scanner for access were quite cool! :)
Bill
If the /. effect takes hold maybe they don't deserve to stick around! :)
First VA Linux, then Exodus, next thing you know we'll find out that slashdot's boxes are running on BeOS!
...has hosting facilities right next door to Exodus in a lot of cities. Makes it easy to "walk next door", perhaps?
I'll bet HSBC are pretty p*ssed - they're owed about $2 billion.
Dictionary.com defines:Exodus
exodus
n.
1. A departure of a large number of people.
Vendor 1: "You had *how many* hits during the World Trade Center Crisis? Jesus Christ! I don't think we served that much data in 1998 and 99 put together!"
Vendor 2: "We can host your website, but we'll need to add some servers... and some bandwidth capabilities... and some reinforced steel floors to keep those servers from damaging the foundation when they crash and...:"
Taco: "How Much?"
Vendor 2: "One Million Dollars! Err... One Hundred Billion Dollars!"
Vendor 3: (Runs away crying)
Vendor 4: Of course I can host your website Mr. Malda. All you need to do is sign here on the dotted line... in blood please. Your harem of Natalie Portman clones and your Beowulf Cluster of Slashdot Cruisers will also be arriving shortly. Thank you for doing business with us. I assure you that your soul will be in *very* good hands.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
this was on reuters two days ago
My company is also hosted at Exodus. I must say that as far as service goes, they have been TOP NOTCH. Really helpful.
Engineer on duty helping troubleshoot interface errors at 3am. That stuff counts...
Also, at our IDC, the conference rooms are named after James Bond movies! Cool!
Their IDC's are impressive facilities and I sincerely hope that they stay around...
Our sales rep was a casualty of this chapter 11 filing... Too bad, he is a nice guy.
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
1 year ago, we started a new web application. We already had a cage at Exodus, but we need more room. It was almost impossible to get a 8 rack cage at that time. We managed to finally get one, and we set up our equipment. Since that time, I haven't been back there for about 8 months. Just went back there the other day and was suprised to see empty cages galore.
how many of us are going to be crying ourselves to sleep at night if the commercialization of the internet ends and it's back to the way it used to be in the good old days?
I hate to see Exodus go out of business as much as anyone else, but to make an omlette...
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
They're considered by many to be Exodus's chief competition. Watch these guys get huge.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
They have a commitment for as much as $200 million financing from GE Capital, "which will be used to fund operating expenses and supplier and employee obligations". They won't be under for long. This really is just a reorganization.
1Alpha7
Live to be Moderated
The thing that always sticks out in my mind about Exodus is that their router in Chicago was #$%^ed up for about a month over the summer, making it impossible to play EverQuest. About 80% of packets were dropped going through that node. That's fine for web pages - TCP/IP is designed with packet loss in mind, and it resends packets and all that if it doesn't quite make it. On the other hand, a UDP game doesn't have all that error checking built in, and if you drop more than about a dozen packets in a row, you've lost the connection.
They repaired the problem, but that always sticks out in my mind, that they didn't quite have it together for a long time. And the less enlightened people blamed it on Sony.
J.W.
Note that filing for protection from creditors while reorganizing is not the same as hanging up a big "closed" sign
Wariac
Remember it, write it down, take a picture, I dont give a fsck!
... in that they sorta borrow money long-term (equity) and lend it short-term (purchasing depreciating hardware). Now this is OK if people are idiots enough to pay obscene amounts (dot.con) like clueless venture capitalists but if you get the situation where all your customers disappear (dot-bomb), you are left with a nice little term called negative cash-flow.
... buy monopolies like underwater sea cables.
Seriously, unless the costs hit marginal pricing level, you have to be very very good to make money in the deflatory environment that Moore laws produces (as can be seen by the dire straits of many PC box-pushers).
Conclusion
LL
Picked up from an article on zdnet.
...
The Exodus data centre in California, one of 43 worldwide, sits utterly undistinguished amid the sprawl fanning out from Los Angeles International Airport. The company's name doesn't even appear on the building, but the unassuming facade, which is wrapped in bulletproof Kevlar, belies its extremely high security, almost to the point of paranoia.
Inside, a biometric hand scanner, another layer of bulletproof glass, two Pinkerton security guards, and a 500-pound door block access to 66,000 climate-controlled square feet of Internet servers, the online backbones of Exodus clients like Best Buy, eBay, KPMG Consulting, British Airways, Virgin, Merrill Lynch, Yahoo, and some 4,500 other customers. It's estimated that as many as one-third of all Internet clicks pass through Exodus servers. In a real sense what's behind that 500-pound door is, well, the Internet.
....
One third of all clicks.. whew..!
Rapid Nirvana
I'm about to start running a (very high volume) site. Who would you choose to host right now?
AboveNet?
Verio?
I work in the Managed Security Services department of Exodus (disclaimer: these opinions are my own, not Exodus's)...
I can say that fiscal policy was pretty lax for a while, and I'm afraid it still might be. The purchase of GlobalCenter was also probably the biggest nail in our coffin - it weighed us down with a lot of debt and didn't really accomplish anything. Sure GC was our biggest competitor, but they would've gone under without our help after the dot-com crash.
I hope to keep my job, at least for a while longer. The people are nice, the company pays for school, my boss is good on letting me schedule myself as I please...It's been a fun ride. I'm just surprised at the swiftness of the demise. I feel bad that I've kept my job, when several of my friends have been laid off all around me (I was unfortunate enough to witness several of the layoffs personally.)
Either way, I've got other job oppurtunities lined up, so I'm not too scared. However, anyone who sees a resume for someone with Exodus experience, please consider them - they'll be worth the money.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
OSDN is going to have to figure something out. Too many tech companies are going down, I am glad my website is small and part time. Phew.
Gaming Shizzle
Just in case.
Since you happen to be right down the road.
(Local headquarters in Woburn, I think.)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It seems to me that dumping an unprofitable bandwidth hogging organization such as Slashdot would be an ideal restructuring move in the eyes of Exodus' execs. That would be a real bummer, Slashdot is such a vivid part of the Innurnet culture.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
With PSINet tanking bad, Exodus on the Rocks and Above.net far behind (Not to mention Rhythms, Northpoint, etc..) , we have to start asking ourselves: "Do we have a vital national security interest in seeing these networks survive?" I think we do.
Sure you can scream "Corporate Welfare" all day, but when the rubber hits the road (or whatever cliche' you like to use) we have got to insure the stability of these networks, notwithstanding the costs involved.
Question:
Does anyone know how close these troubled companies are to shutting down?
How do we do an effective cost-benefit analysis on bailing out these networks? (Which ones to help, etc..)
Who gets left holding the bag on these debts if the federal gov't decide to force them to keep operating and their vendors to keep supplying them?
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
despite bullet proof glass , kiddies own half those servers i'm guessing.
Not the end of the world for Exodus I mean. Obviously it isn't the end of the world for everyone else.
IIRC Exodus have fourty something hosting facilities, presumably mostly empty right now, but they do have a lot of work and an excellent reputation. They'll be fine, they just need to downscale by a factor of, like, five. This, and the refinancing by GE, are just a part of that process.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Is it time to move sites away , to other suppliers. Or do people think they will survive this trobule ?
Cruise TT
Exodus is still operating, and hopefully will be able to keep the LEDs turned on for a good long while (since Slashdot is hosted there)
So since slashdot is there they should be able to keep the lights on for a long time?
Ah the wonders of English.
On the serious side, can anyone tell me how these places manage to lose so much money? Is it the labor, site or networking costs? It seems like web hosting should be an industry that, once you climb to the scale of Exodus, is really really profitable.
"...is not the same as hanging up a big "closed" sign -- Exodus is still operating, ...for a good long while (since Slashdot is hosted there)."
/. is going to post in the hopes of being the Last Post.
Oh great, I see it coming. Very soon, everyone at
For once we finaly have an opportunity to out-post those First-Posters clones.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
I know that two days ago all my packets headed to ICQ's (aol's) servers were hopping to Above.Net, and then just dieing.
I had never seen that name before until then, and seeing that they may be going broke very soon is kinda interesting.
It's estimated that as many as one-third of all Internet clicks pass through Exodus servers. In a real sense what's behind that 500-pound door is, well, the Internet. [emphasis mine]
And they're still filing for bankruptcy. Go figure... Crappy business plan, anyone? I guess it really is a re-org.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
I used to do some work for clients who had their systems at exodus and I found that it all seemed a little over the top. I've never understood why a datacenter needs 12 confrence rooms (or any for that matter... it's an OutSourced Datacenter, not a Marriot), bullet proof glass in the lobby, redundancy beyond reason - generators with enough fuel and power to run for 120 days at FULL load???? If the power is down for 6 months, chances are there's more important things to deal with than your website.
Also, when I was shopping around for my own hoster, Exodus (while _extremely_ nice) didn't even bother trying to price within a budget. It was if they had been so used to getting blind VC money, that they didn't even understand the phrase, "I can't afford that." I don't know, just my opinion....
It's about time. Exodus and some of the other cited services (above.net) are some of the biggest spamhauses on the 'net. Now if some of the other spamhaus supporters (e.g., genuity.com) would die the 'net would have a LOT less spam!
Great place FiberCloud.com
Great People, Great Service, no STOOPID bursting policies (cough Exodus cough).
The place is like Exodus, trick hardware, trick eye ball scanner security, big fat pipes to the Net.
CRN reports on CEO William Krause's (CEO for a month) conference call. "The action we took yesterday has given us the protection we need to restructure our debts and proceed on much more stable footing than before, and if you felt secure doing business with Exodus six months ago, you should feel even more secure today."
Which Hosting Centre with Global Reach is left after so many went the way of the dodo - PSINet sang the same tune a while ago "our European operations are not affected" (read "if you want to buy our European operations you can do so with little debt cos' the US operation takes it all in)
The only names I can come up with right now are:
- UUNet
- NTT/Verio
- C&W
- ????
Cheers,
brrrrrr
brrrrrr it's cold
I have worked for several companies that host at Exodus, and I have never need such disregard for fiduciary responsibility in my life. Most of the Exodus centers in and about the Santa Clara area, and there are many, many of which I have visited all tell the same story.
This story was capacity that was build on expectation values attained from an unrealistic market. The bigger companies knew this, but the feeding frenzy was not abated even in light of its fiscal mindlessness.
Why not wait to expand until you are bursting at the seams, having problems accepting new customers? Most people at Exodus cheap out anyway, I know a few personally that only buy non burstable 1mbit. Yet they built an infrastructure such that every cage could get an OC3 worth of bandwidth.
I was in awe when my company got us a 6509, a 7206 and a 7507. We got this stuff used and it cost us a mint. I cant believe what Exodus did, the bought miles of $200,000 routers, switches and other things, miles of giant Liebert batteries, huge air conditioners, diesel power generators, hired the most moronic and incapable security guards on the planet, and bought these hand scanners that never - ever - seem to work right.
At Digital Island, much is the same. The lease on all the equipment must be in the millions per month. The sad thing is that most of the carrier technology will probably change before the lease is up on a lot of the stuff.
My suggestion to businesses: Never expect anything - Only expand to meet demand. If you are constantly "full," you can charge a premium rather than build a football field worth or colocation space for 10 customers.
I have seen a few co location centers pop up recently; they are more intelligent in design. They don't wire in bandwidth until its needed, they don't buy equipment until its needed (and the BUY it), they have a building which is neat, like Exodus, but isn't extravagant, I mean, they make all the Exodus co-locations look like clean rooms at NASA or Intel.
Co-location recipe: 1) Cheap warehouse in area close to a few OC-12 central offices. Make place look like Costco with lower roof. Add a few miles of Chatsworth ladder track. Buy routers per every some number of people that reaches three quarters capacity, avoid fiber to the cage until customers actually need it. Hire good people. Don't over invest in lame hand scanners that do work. (If every cage is locked, what would a person do in there anyway? Pull power cords from the mesh? And do this without getting caught?). Peer with a few carriers and scale up when needed. Most bandwidth is idle most of the time, bragging about OC-48 interconnects isn't cool, its useless.
My current place of Employment was trying to get on Exodus's price list with our technology. The concept was to pay Exodus $50,000, the "verify" our product, then they will resell it.
We laughed and moved on, knowing full well they were trying to squeeze for revenue - and we didn't need the endorsement of a dying behemoth.
With Chapter 11, maybe Exodus will need to get smart. It has to now shift from building big, inefficient farms to having to farm the land you have properly to produce revenue.
I wish Exodus the best of luck, and stop thinking you are AT&T or some such. Exodus is an overpriced co-location center with unresponsive technical support and too many dead weight employees.
(One of the employees was shocked to find out we didn't have Visio 2000 installed, and he could not give the diagrams to me in JPG or PNG or PDF or some other useful format. I kept getting VSD files. I asked for a network diagram in xfig or something that we can use, and still, a blank stare)
Interesting.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
No wonder they're bankrupt! All that fancy hardware, really just for PR.
sulli
RTFJ.
A year ago, they didn't have enough space. Now they have plenty. I hope they can survive this, as they really do a great job. They route a TON of traffic, and this would really disrupt quite a large number of people. Anyone else here ever spend hours on end in the ice cold Waltham IDC?
Um, this is my sig.
(My previous company used Exodus and went through a long decision-making process to pick them. Now what? - I understand that they'll stay "in business" but what if?)
funny that in the middle of trying to post this, /. (hosted by exodus) becomes temporarily unavailable.....
And lo, Moses said, "Let my people go."
"crappy business plan"?? No! Just dotcom fallout! When I walked through there, it was INSANE the size of the cages for certain dotcoms. The whole friggin place was a dotcom castle. They charged a crapload of money and still got business. I mean, what are you going to do when your business is going great, and then the market crashes/goes back to normal, and all your customers die? How can you make a business plan that protects you from your customers and still make money?
that if Exodus starts selling some of their real estate, my living-in-a-colo dream will come true! Screw that living in a wired warehouse crap. I want my building to be ON the backbone and protected from the strongest earthquakes and bomb attacks, et al. Yeah! I'll be l33t!
:) Ohhh the raised floors were smooooth and the room was so biiiig. *sigh*
I swear, every time I went there and saw all the space that they were preparing during their expansions - I just wanted to grab a skateboard or some blades and just ride around. Either that or an office chair
I was just up in Vancouver visiting a managed hosting company called Roundheaven Communications. While I was signing in to receive my visitor pass I noticed the three individuals signed in before me marked their company down as Slashdot. I could not make out the names however because they were more or less unreadable.
I'm sorry that Exodus's iminent demise/re-org/whatever is probably going to put a bunch of people on the street, job-wise.
I'm not sorry that one of the biggest havens for spammers on the face of the 'net is about to go flooey. I've got huge chunks of Exodus IP space in my domain's local 'Deny' list due to Exodus doing bupkis about their spammy customers. I wonder if I will soon be able to clean some of that out...?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I've seen it go from 64$ to 14 cents a share. My two cents? Down the drain. ;p
PayPal $$ if you sign up for free offers (eBay, cred cards, e
Internap has colo space and excellent connectivity.
I posted this to /. two days ago and it was rejected. Jerks. They host Yahoo, eBay and Battle.net as well. Oh, to whoever's left playing Anarchy Online: yup, Exodus as well.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
TCP is designed to deal with loss, yes, but only loss due to congestion. When it encounters loss, it backs off. The problem is, if you get loss due to some other reason, like radio noise or a faulty unit, where congestion isn't the cause, tcp will just keep slowing down trying to fix the problem, when in fact, the best solution would be to just keep retrying without changing parameters.
UDP, on the other hand.. just means they didn't want to rely on TCP's flow control. UDP does have error checking; there is a checksum in the IP header.
It doesn't mean there is necessarily no error chekcing or retransmission.. it just means they did it their own way. OF course, I have no idea how the Everquest protocol actually works...
Forgive the anonymous bit, you'll understand why in a moment.
We've hosted with Exodus for over two years. We're on the same contract we started with and have been using five times our bandwidth for half that time. We're still billed for our original amount! We should be paying tens of thousands of dollars more per month.
Seeing some of the other posts here that are similiar, it's no surprise they are in trouble. They expanded too quickly but I think they should do okay in Chapter 11.
Aside from the billing issue (which was fine with us) we have had awesome experiences with them.
(DISCLAIMER: I own stock in EXDS)
Albeit a bit expected, it is shocking to find that Exodus Communications has gone ahead and filed for bankruptcy.
Let's see, it's a bit expected, yet shocking? Is there anyone out there that still holds a decent command of written language?
I worked for a company that had 2 racks there. We moved all of our equipment from exodus to above.net, and every several months we would get a frantic call from exodus saying our machines were down! This happened half a dozen times, and each time we told them we had moved our boxes, and followed up with an email. The first time it happened it was funny, the next few times it was a little ridiculous.
Note: I am posting this AC because quite a few Exodus employees know my /. account name.
Exodus is screwed. They have been losing customers at an alarming rate for a variety of reasons, including:
- The dotcom collapse. Exodus spent a fortune on these customers, many of whom never paid them a cent.
- Customers that left due to dissatisfaction. This includes even Hotmail, who left Exodus because, well, they suck.
- Incompetence. While Exodus had some incredible employees, they also had a LOT of terrible ones, a huge factor in the horrible network problems that Exodus customers have.
-The GlobalCenter buyout. Exodus bought GlobalCenter from Global Crossing. After the merger Exodus pissed of numerous customers with their poor service, resulting in the loss of such big name clients as Verisign and Google.
I have had some good talks with some important people at Exodus, and that company is SCREWED. Most of their datacenters are at least half empty, and many of the ones they built in 2000-2001 never had a single customer. If anyone is thinking about buying Exodus stock at low, low prices, DON'T.
If your website is important to your business, and is hosted somewhere, then by definition, the financial stability of that 'somewhere' is something you have to pay attention to.
Just as with manufacturing, where not only do you source your parts, but you find a second-source for them as well, and also verify that THOSE sources are not using the same supplier... etc, etc. You find two sources that are as independent as possible, even going out to making sure the raw materials are coming from different parts of the world. Why? So a disaster somewhere along the line doesn't stop your business.
Running a website is no different. You need to be able to move to a new location, or even have a second location set up already, in case of a problem.
How does one get a hand on the equipment after a company goes bust? I realize that it all ends up in an auction yard at some point and that most of the equip. at Exodus is not owned by Exodus and therefore will not be found at the swap meet anytime soon. However, the question is still valid. Where are the deals in used equipment?
mod this up its funny
so is this...
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: PLEASE DON'T USE SO MANY CAPS. USING CAPS IS LIKE YELLING!
They lose money because they spent huge amounts of money to "build capacity" during the dot-com boom. That included buying up other hosting providers. Now many of their customers are gone, they have enormous excess capacity, and they can't service their debt load.
The fact that while money was easy, they wasted it horribly also doesn't help. The businesses that succeed are the ones that plan for the downturn, even as they are building capacity, rather than spending as if there's no tomorrow.
During the dot-com boom, the conventional wisdom (which, as is often the case, was actually foolishness) was that you had to spend big to gain market share to survive the coming shakeout. That's a little different from planning for a downturn: it's planning to be the biggest when the downturn comes.
It's like a game of chicken, where companies compete on how ludicrously they can overspend. In this environment, it's easy to lose sight of why you're spending the money, and get carried away. Strategic thinking is replaced by keeping-up-with-the-Amazons.
How else could the Aeron chair fad be explained??? :)
My company has used Verio (formerly Digital Nation) for over two years. Service as been top notch and they have more bandwidth than we'd ever need. At out peak, we were pumping out a continous 62 megabits/second and our ping times never grew a millisecond. Their prices are lower than most of their competition and they're fast acting (every departman that is aside from billing -- billing will try to screw you by continuing to bill you for some service you changed or deleted months ago... so watch your statements).
Verio rocks.
You realize you've just given either Neal Stephenson or William Gibson the framework for their next novel.
I can see it now, Hiro Protagonist will move from his U-Stor-It to the nearest Exodus IDC...
Rob? Better look for a new provider! Exodus has been a spamhaven for some time. Here's the scoop: Spamhaus.org ROSKO entry, with full list of spammers and their spam, replies, etc.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Some selected providers:
Navisite: market cap $13 million
Globix: market cap $26 million
Exodus: market cap $95 million
SAVVIS: market cap $67 million
....
So, for a couple days of profit Microsoft could buy them all of them.
We use SUNGUARD services for mainframe data storage. God help us if we ever actually need that data in an emergency :(
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
nor would they need all these addition terrorist security laws. If the ran all the traffic they could build a snoop clause right into the contract.
Subject: Re: Does Exodus bankruptcy mean Battle.Net gone?
From: GFraizer (Shlonglor)
Host: Blizzard Entertainment
Date: Wed Sep 26 12:41:44
On Wed Sep 26 12:35:29, Wondering wrote:
> I heard the Exodus server hosting company has filed for bankruptcy.
> Does that mean that Battle.Net will be going away, since Battle.Net
> is hosted by Exodus?
Exodus is no longer a Battle.net hosting partner.
Shlonglor
and CHILLY this time of year but their business seems to be on solid footing (pun intended)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I know abovenet has at least one customer, Aimster, who owes them ~$500,000. It's customers like that that cause these ISPs to tank. The thing I don't understand is why the ISPs just don't cut these customers off as soon as they're past due, especially in this time when most of their customers are themselves failing.
I think we do business with that guy. He's always flaming us...
Best Slashdot Co
The kevlar fronting and bulletproof glass is for when their investors come-a-calling.
Scary to think of a company of tens of thousands of employees whose name is the complete sentence : "I B.M."
Anyway I guess another hosting company will inevitably be seeing an inflow of customers from the "Exodus exodus" : Inflow
...you fool.
<bart
Kiddies can't AFFORD Exodus.... They're usually still operating sites out of their parents' basement...
I'll be the one dancing, cheering, and urinating on the grave of Exodus. Those cocksuckers there filled my e-mail box with so much spam that my only reaction to this story about their misfortune is great happiness.
So to Exodus, those mega-whoring spam bitches, I say GOOD BY AND GOOD RIDDANCE.
Yes, I know this is flamebait, but it feels real good.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I'm a former GlobalCenter employee. Fortunatley I left the company before Exodus bought them off Global Crossing. I had worked for Global Center for about 2 years previously. I watched the data center I worked in grow from one suite to half the building it was in, to the entire building it was in, to adding 180,000 sq. feet down the street.
.com out that has gone bust is just as guilty as EXDS. We had foozball and pool tables, video games, and catered lunches. Just like every other .com out there. It was just the way that things were done.
Every time the company grew it was because the current space was either full or spoken for. In fact, while we were waiting for the 180,000 sq. feet to open we crammed cages in our existing building in places where we never would have before...next to AC units, around fire supression tanks, and even moved the NOC into the office to sell the space in the NOC.
After we opened the 180,000 sq. feet the building began to fill up amid the rumors of an EXDS sale. Yet still everything seemed ok.
The "buy, buy, buy" mentality really was justified. We had sold roughly 1/4 of the new 180,000 sq. feet 6 months before building completion. A building that large requires a _lot_ of network gear. A building that large requires a _lot_ of backup generator power. Many customers (especially financial type companies, of which GCTR hosted many) are very interested in bio-metric hand scanners, kevlar, etc.
For quite a while there it seemed like we couldn't spend the money fast enough. But I don't think that's a problem suffered by the hosters alone. Every
EXDS wasn't doomed by mismanagement, overspending, or anything else that people keep talking about. The problem is that a huge number of their customers went out of buisness themselves, and a majority of those couldn't pay their bills when they left. They expanded when they should have, but now they need to shrink.
To stay alive EXDS should close a bunch of their empty data centers, sell off the extra gear, and use the money they make off that to keep operating. They do (or at least did) have a fairly decent number of large "name brand" customers who haven't gone out of buisness. That should help pay the bills for a while.
In my attractive one-bedroom flat.
I have a DSL link!!
x2 inbound bandwidth! Great for those sites that, er, you know, have lots of uploads and comments and stuff!
...Like Slashdot. CmdrTaco, bring me the servers. I'll set up IP_MASQ and we'll be up and running in no time. We'll show those bastards how to do hosting!
- undoware.ca
That's a good question; but companies like Sears and General Electric don't seem to have a problem.
;) .
I saw a similar thing happen with another hosting company, Relera. They had awesome facilities. Problem is they were still building new ones in May of this year, even when 4 of their total 11 had zero (ZERO!) customers.
Admittedly that's probably a bit different from Exodus' situation, even though Exodus was supposedly a major investor in Relera
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
IBM, one of the biggest in the world.
one t0q too many i'd say.
I believe yahoo is hosted at Exodus as well. I'm not really sure, but if that's the case, they may just buy Exodus and keep the infrastructure... Think about it... On these days of economic chaos, if you have a little bit of spare money in your pockets you can buy a lot for less.
(I'm just wondering here if yahoo isn't in a similarly unpleasant situation...)
Ummm . . . maybe you shouldn't leave your email address in your profile if you don't like spam.
Any robot in the world can harvest -
pdrap@startrekmail.com
pdrap@startrekmail.com
pdrap@startrekmail.com
- out of a post here, and you're blessed for life.
Enjoy the influx of mail peanut brain.
LONG LIVE EXODUS - ALL HAIL THE RESTRUCTURING!
WE WILL STILL CRUSH OUR COMPETETITION!
signed,
Ellen's Love Slave.
PS - We're just going to change our name and bounce right back. (After a few more bad checks of course! Shouts out to my boys Cisco and Liebert!)
Check out savvis. Top notch service and a faster network than exodous.
If they stay in business I have no doubts that they'll soon be one of the largest players around.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
That address forwards to my other addresses.
If I start getting too much spam on that address, I will just point it at uce@ftc.gov and go get another one.
So, I don't really give a rats ass if the spammers get that address.
Bet you didn't think of that, you retard.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Cool companies like Exodus staying in biz and providing competition and customer service == goooooooooooood.
h ere , featuring high prices, low security, and low service == BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD.
Cool companies like Exodus dying, getting bought out, and consolidated into the Benevolent People's Dictatorship of AOL/TimeWarner/Corpnamehere/Corpnamehere/Corpname
Let's recap. Goooooooooooooooooooooooood > BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD. I think we understand these concepts now, hmmm?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I believe that he meant 0wN in terms of 'cracked', not own in terms of posession.
When I was working for Global Center, they were still building their new 100k ^2 foot facility in Sunnyvale. It filled up as fast as they could keep the techs installing hardware and power.
When you design a facility right, you put in an infrastructure to support a maxxed out facility.
If you take over a warehouse to turn into a farm, you have to keep upgrading what you have. And that will never work out as well as a properly designed facility.
Also remember that everything done at a datafarm is techincal and very expensive.
I got out of Global Center before the end of last year, before the Exodus thing. All the perks of working there were gone by then anyway.
Wonder if Exodus ever got enough power and airconditioning to supply Hotmail and Google?
Berbee is in good shape. Give them a look, www.berbee.com
So is Vendor 4 supposed to be the Devil, or Bill Gates?
Oh, wait, nevermind...
I'd love to see slashdot hosted on a 56K link out of Rob's bedroom.
:wq
DataVaults.com (the little colo in Toronto that I own a piece of) is 85% full. We're profitable. This seems to be unique. Maybe Slashdot needs a new hosting provider :).
... maybe even 100,000 feet of colo, but Exodus (among others) built millions of feet. We even had "experts" tell us that we weren't players unless we built our own 100,000 feet.
I've thought for a long while that Toronto needs a few thousand
I'm beginning to think that the last man standing will win at this game.
Why the hell didn't VALinux take a shot of that and put it up somewhere? It was the best add for VALinux hardware I had ever seen. How many boxen is in that cage? 16 1Us? How many run slashdot? It was impressive to see in action. It was even more fun to surf slashdot during lulls--since I was 4 cages down working for the ill-fated Voter.com.
I hope you guys have pictures to remember it by. But then, you might be sick of the cage (I got sick of mine pretty quick). They don't call 'em cages for nothing.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
GE diversifies like mad. They really have a major problem being hurt. Have you seen their list of the companies they own?
But if you're talking about hosting services, GE owned or at least had a lot of stock in one of them that tanked. My understanding is that GE stuck it out until the bitter end and then had to move all their servers in one night to a new colo.
S4R does hosting, colo, services, and has rack space in SBC's Irvine IDC. Inflow is also good (and in SoCal, if you need that), but I get a very Exodus-like feeling from them... more sizzle than steak, like they've bought too many Aeron chairs.
Whatever happens, if you have a server in an Exodus rack, you should probably make plans.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
The site is now named HarvardNet Sucked - note the past tense
HarvardNet, after being sold to Allegiance Telecom in a somewhat questionable stock and cash deal, was renamed to hosting.com and made one of a family of data centers across the country. Most amusingly, the years-old (and pretty inaccurate) map of the Boston Data Center is still viewable on the hosting.com site. Apparently the people working on the site used what they had available, and not what was accurate. But here's the kicker:
Yep, out the door. It was painted as a "sabbatical" from the stresses of running the company. It was more likely a laundry trip from all the dirt stains he got running the company into the ground. But we're a little distanced from the whole process these days, what with nearly every spy we had in the company now on to greener pastures. It took a while for us to know that Mark had been ka-booted, and that's kind of sad; we should have been right there, hours after he left, to do some sort of dance or something on this site. But, you do what you can, right? So out he goes, with a rumored package deal to get him out of Allegiance's hair. That should go down well with all of you who were laid off in December, just in time for Christmas. Money for running HarvardNet (poorly), Money for selling HarvardNet (for running it poorly) and now money for leaving HarvardNet (after selling it and running it poorly).Now since it is run by a whole different company, different management, we should continue to condemn the situation?
makes sense to me.
or an obsolete hatred for people long gone
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"(DISCLAIMER: I own stock in EXDS)"
If you have firsthand experience with their inability to bring in the money owed to them, why the HELL do you own their stock?
Tell me it was a Christmas present, or something...
W|-|4t 1s j00 T41|<1ng 4|30ut????!!!!!
1f 1 OwnZ j00 |30><or 1T5 M1Ne f4g><0R!!!###
IBM would be a mistake, just ask youself what their core-business is ... its not hosting, so hosting is the first thing to go in a restructuring excersise (like Intel Online Services)
just my 2ct
brrrrrr it's cold
All I know is, up until a few months ago, candy and soda from the vending machines at Exodus was free to all customers. Then one day, they made everything cost $0.25 and I knew they were hurting.
Ahh, well. They had a lot of fancy security, that in reality could have been easily bypassed by crawling under the floor panels which lift up.
I just feel bad for even more people who have now lost their jobs while the rest of the country is too busy being hyped up for war that they don't even notice.
Chapter 11 protection just prevents the debtors from collecting while a company reorganizes.
Priority for Exodus is reorganizing its debt. IDCs take a lot of time to plan and build. The last round that opened in 2000 were on the drawing board in 98.
With the revenue that Exodus sees, it is highly unlikely that they will close. Downsizing and/or acquisition by IBM or EDS are likely outcomes.
'course, what they fail to mention is that the hosting facility has floor to ceiling *normal* double paned windows *in the colo*.
<P>
At least, that's the way it is in Santa Clara... All that physical security is a joke, it's just to make the executives of client companies feel better.
<P>
They waste money in other interesting ways too, like with LCD windows that become transparent at the push of a button to reveal.... the colo....
<P>
That said, I hope they don't go bust, that would be a big, big problem.
-- I don't have a cool sig.
Yes the NOC were a great bunch of people but what this person fails to record was that the 'tender mercies' were supposed to be the educated guidance of the technical account managers (TAM's) and subsidised training which was never forthcoming under the GCTR or EXDS system of CRM. At least this was the case in London, obviously I cannot comment on the situation for the rest of the Datacentres only the one I had experience in. Eliza
they will still be in business.
What are the benefits of Chapter 11? How long can the Exodus keep going?
You made me think what kind of people would live in Gates' house instead of him. Suppose he dies or can't afford it. Who would buy it? What for? Imagine it full of squatters.
And by the way, would they find a sled named "Rosebud"?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
... and could see something coming which is why I jumped. At about the time of the second round of layoffs I decided to pull in a favour and went to a reseller I'd done a lot of business with. My reasons for jumping - I had the option of working for a company which had cash and was profitable rather than one which had debt and was losing money.
My big gripe was that the guys (men and women) who earned commission on the deals they sold had no stake in the execution of that business. Once a customer had signed on the dotted line, the Account Executive took his/her commission, and moved on. If the project went pear shaped then there was no clawback, and there was every incentive for Salesmen to oversell the offering. There were times when we techies would get bollocked by the salesmen for telling customers the truth - they just wanted to offer whatever it took to clinch the deal and then run.
Debt, debt, debt. EXDS had 17 consecutive quarters of double digit growth (not double digit annual growth, double digit *quarterly* growth), and the whole mentality was that of the frontier. What happened was that EXDS reached the West coast, and after several years of cherry picking they had to go back and win business on grounds other than "we're here and we're great". The skills needed to run a business once its marketplace is starting to mature are radically different to those of the frontier, and the *depth* just isn't there. Period.
EXDS got big ideas when its shareprice was high, and it could pretend to be a big company. They were going to develop from being a Hosting company into an umbrella IT solutions provider. They crammed in technical people, many good, some iffy, with headcount rather than capability being the objective - they wanted to be BIG. But the basic controls were lacking, so you got stupid gotchas - a block pulling some structured cabling accidently undoing a power cord, and causing an outage on a live site. A HA cluster being modified by a third party backup solution company, and not being revalidated. Sure it happens anywhere, but it happened too often at EXDS
EXDS were also the past masters of reneging on deals. Time and again they would "partner" with somebody, proclaim it to be the best thing since sliced bread, only to go behind the partner's back and make another partnership with a competitor. The deal makers thought this was really clever - in fact it was really dumb, and technical staff who'd worked making relationships with partners found the rug pulled from under their feet.
It's too late now. Most of the good technical staff have jumped. The irony is that EXDS have a good offering for space/power/bandwidth, worth paying over the odds for. But the people who know what they're doing are so far removed from the business end that the organisation doesn't work. The staff turn over so fast at management levels that there's no maturity in the company. No ownership of issues. No single face to the customers (they get told to "phone the XYZ department"). It won't get better until somebody buys the company out and the entire culture changes and pretty much all the staff except the techies are changed. And then there needs to be some stability.
carriers (uunet, genuity, att) that run into 3 different sides of the building, and if they ever reach 40% they bump up to OC-192. They manage money well, they only build there facility out more when the need arizes. The people are very friendly and very helpful. Besides that, for our company exodus just was too big business feeling and we wanted a company that understood that we were small and wanted us. If you absolutely have to say that your servers sit behind two layers of cinder blocks with a layer of kevlar in between, then please move your boxes their, else if you want almost fanatical service and unbeatable uptime look at inflow. I have to say since I moved our servers I have been extremely happy with Inflow, and we are extremely happy that we went with them instead of Exodus, and in the Atlanta area I know of a lot of large companies that are moving to Inflow from exodus
I see someone else has experience with IBM^H^H^H, er I mean HAL's sales reps
If you go to NASDAQ.com, you will find that EXDS is halted as of 9/26, pending further news. At $0.17, not much room left between here and 0 anyway... may want to sell for a loss when you can. (JMHO)
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Actually most of the bullet proof glass, security guards, and kevlar are for insurance purposes. A large bank or large financial company needs curtain security in place to get the insurance they need. At least that's what a sales guy said on a tour of Boston2(where /. is). I walk by slashdot's cage every day and I don't think I've seen anyone in there yet.
Ticker = EXDS Eliza
We were lucky - we got some training. But it wasn't just that it was listening to the customer, and doing what THEY (the customer) wanted. When I transitioned to Exodus, it was "Well you only handle the initial setup, and the firewall is set up by a different group, and the servers are set up by a different group." Give me a break - I'm supposed to explain to a customer that a multitude of people would work on their equipment, and nothing would really be coordinated.
I like the GC mentality, Glad to hear that Exodus might be going to that, it might make it worthwhile to spend the oodles of money that Exodus charges for a cage, and the staff time.......
I've noticed that alot of companies are incorprated in the state of deleware, the company I work for included. Why choose deleware if their company's headquarters isn't even in the state?
[Got Hosting?]
Easy. Follow the revenue.
:)
Who has long term prospects based on their relationships and alliances with customers? Those are the guys who are likely to survive. Over the long term, data center hosting is really fixed costs (it costs the same to run a data center whether you have 2 or 200 customers in there) so it all comes down to volume. My sense is that it will probably shake out to 2 major players; most likely Exodus and Verio.
Full Disclaimer: I work for Exodus
- Junta
Hint: traceroute ge.com.