Best Places to Co-Locate?

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

Comments

Places to CoLocate

[Leghk]

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.

Re:Places to CoLocate

[yod@]

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.

Re:Check out Above.net

[Brian G.]

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