11–20 of 184 posts
Where would you go to find a "condo"? There are no links in the article. What is the pricing/reliability/support like having your own server in someone else's data center?
You forgot another popular option that a lot of people use as an alternative to the "monastery" stage: shared hosting (shudder).
Can anyone recommend a good guide to getting started with colo? Obvious questions include:
Where do you go to buy a cheap server? Can you just have it shipped direct to the data centre, or do you need to configure it yourself? How does that even work for startups in a different country to the data centre? Is there anything I should look for in a data centre to make it easier? Do any offer out of band consoles? What sort of costs are we talking about? Is there a break-even point beyond which you really should colo instead of using VPS? Is there a detailed tutorial anywhere on "getting your first coloed server up and running without bricking the stupid thing and needing to spend thousands of dollars getting a data centre technician to fix it"?
And so on. :) It seems like there are a LOT of resources to hold your hand as you get up to speed with Linode-type services, but colo is dark magic.
colocation was expensive and the hardware problems were all mine. i was pretty much tied to my local datacenter because i didn't want to ship a server around (which would be at least a day of downtime). pricing can be hard to compare because of power/space/bandwidth. if the equipment i colocated didn't have IPMI support, it could sometimes take up to a half hour to have a datacenter tech be able to put a remote console online when there were problems. at the end of it, i had a bunch of servers that were worthless on the resale market due to their age.
VPSes were never a serious option for the reasons stated in this article. it's impossible to track down performance problems when a dozen other VPS customers on the same server are taxing the CPUs and disks. i do use one that i pay $10/month for just to run a network monitor for some off-network perspective. they can be useful for single-task servers that don't need a lot of processing power like dns servers.
with dedicated servers, though, you can signup on a website and within a few hours have a complete server with modern CPUs, disks, and lots of memory assembled, tested, and connected to the internet with a remote console waiting for an o/s installation. when hardware goes bad, the server provider has lots of spare parts waiting around to be swapped in for free. and the best part of all, when you're ready to upgrade or move to a different provider, you just cancel the account and let the provider worry about what to do with the old hardware. i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month.
Where would you go to find a "condo"? There are no links in the article. What is the pricing/reliability/support like having your own server in someone else's data center?
Huffington Post, Gawker, BuzzFeed, CafeMom and AdMeld all co-lo with http://www.datagram.com/, most of them are within a few feet of each other.
Where would you go to find a "condo"? There are no links in the article. What is the pricing/reliability/support like having your own server in someone else's data center?
Search for [colocation].
Sorting out messy cabling or adding redundancy to a badly managed rack on live hardware is not fun.
[1] http://www.vibrant.com/cable-messes.php (for reference, this is what it should look like: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/01/24/when-data-center-cabling...)
You forgot another popular option that a lot of people use as an alternative to the "monastery" stage: shared hosting (shudder).
Agree. I was surprised they overlooked this one. Perhaps they couldn't think of an appropriate metaphor. Prison? Orphanage?
Whorehouse.
This is an excellent write-up; I like the metaphors, and it doesn't feel too much like it's trying to force a preordained conclusion. One option I have trouble fitting in, though, is the "run your own server locally". This might be #5, except it's often seen as actually a lower-class option than #4, rather than a step up: before you go all out with a colocated server, how about just a machine with Apache sitting in t…
it's probably not included because keeping your production server outside of a datacenter is kind of a silly idea. you save some money, but you don't have the cooling, the power conditioning, the network redundancy, or the security of a proper facility.
You forgot another popular option that a lot of people use as an alternative to the "monastery" stage: shared hosting (shudder).
Agree. I was surprised they overlooked this one. Perhaps they couldn't think of an appropriate metaphor. Prison? Orphanage?