I'm looking for a good data center to colocate servers to, any recommendations?

Question

I need to propose a solution to a potential client who wants a good picture of the costs that would be incurred to implement the project. The only problem: I've never done any colocation before.

Any Ideas?

Answer 1

Depends entirely on the requirements, friends. If you're only looking for 3 nines, then you can pop it into someone's closet somewhere. If you need more than that, you need to start shopping around.

A few questions to consider, outside of price:

• What backup power do they have?
• How many redundant internet connections do they have?
• What's their physical security like?
• What infrastructure do they offer, and what do I have to provide?
• How far is it from my office, if I have to go there in the middle of the night to fix something?

For what it's worth, we colo at a Verizon hosting facility near Poughkipsie, NY. It's the end of their trans-atlantic cable, so it's pretty well bulletproof. It's also damned expensive -- you get what you pay for.

Answer 2

You need to look at their uptime graphs. I used to rent a server in NY state, and it had a lot of power outages (to be fair it wasn't them, it was the whole town they were based in).

Then there's the size of the place - be careful of resellers who rent a cage and rent it out, if they go bust (and they are way more likely to do so), that's your equipment locked away and turned off. You can shout at the datacenter owner, but their customer is the defunct provider, not you.

And the biggest issue with colocation is the distance to the centre. Once you've put your server in there, they will reboot it for you, but that's about it (though the good ones will be very helpful, its still not their responsibility) so if a fan or hard drive fails at 2am, you will be the one driving over there to replace it (unless you have a dell or similar onsite service agreement).