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Ask YC: Colocation?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask YC: Colocation?

#11

Post by reidman »

Some additional info/clarification:

Several of us who are involved with the business are going to be moving, and it would be nice to know what kind of facilities will be nearby. The reason we're not looking at CA or east coast is purely preference, though I should note that Oregon/Washington are fair game.

For the record, we've been running on dedicated servers for almost 10 years now, and since we finally got around to making a business out of it we're looking at our upgrade options.

Re: Ask YC: Colocation?

#12

Post by aaronblohowiak »

davidw wrote: post #8
tialys wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't own the servers at Linode. Colocation is putting your server in someone's data center. This is good if you have a large number of custom servers, but don't want to manage the bandwidth, power, cooling etc... yourself.

Yeah, I know what colocation is, and am wondering why you would bother in this day and age. I could see it being worth your while if you were a big enough company to have a significant number of servers and the people to run them. But I really mean 'significant'. For most startups, being able to scale with something like linode seems more advantageous.

GPGPU!

Re: Ask YC: Colocation?

#13

Post by reidman »

davidw wrote: post #2

Why not just use something like linode?

We've been on dedicated servers for a long time, and we're at a point where cost-efficiency and flexibility are our two biggest factors.

We're expecting pretty linear growth, so scaling isn't a huge deal. Up until now we would regularly switch to a better server, stay there until we outgrew it, and then jump again. It's kept us relatively lean/current and our costs have stayed low as the cost/quality of hosting has changed (and we've gotten better at sniffing out good hosts).

Places like linode and slicehost would have been decent options in the past, but we serve 1-2 TB of data each month, so we like to have lots of bandwidth available. And while many dedicated servers offer that, our server admin is pretty picky about the hardware, so she'd like to be able to manage it on her own.

Out of curiosity, how easy is it to 'hook up' two separate Xen instances, assuming Xen is what slicehost and Linode run on? I'm not a server guy, but I actually share a slicehost plan (separate from this particular venture) with one of our fellow News.YC hackers, so I'm familiar with how excellent the company/service is. If they're really that easy to connect/scale then it might be worth the extra cost...

Re: Ask YC: Colocation?

#15

Post by Tangurena »

I recently went on a "plant trip" to visit our local ViaWest datacenter. From memory, their facilities are mostly in CO, UT and TX. It looks like they want to sell managed hosting mostly, but they also have a lot of colocation.

Re: Ask YC: Colocation?

#16

Post by olefoo »

davidw wrote: post #8
tialys wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't own the servers at Linode. Colocation is putting your server in someone's data center. This is good if you have a large number of custom servers, but don't want to manage the bandwidth, power, cooling etc... yourself.

Yeah, I know what colocation is, and am wondering why you would bother in this day and age. I could see it being worth your while if you were a big enough company to have a significant number of servers and the people to run them. But I really mean 'significant'. For most startups, being able to scale with something like linode seems more advantageous.

In addition to custom hardware (like the crypto cards modoc mentions downthread) you also have to look at the potential liabilities you face. If you're involved in a HIPAA compliant environment, or one where you are storing large amounts of personal information, it may be a requirement that you have certain controls on physical access to the machinery and logical access to the data that are harder to guarantee with a VM Provider.

This isn't to say that a VM might not be perfectly acceptable for parts of your operation. But realistically, at this time if you look at the way most of the compliance documents for data security are written; you cannot be compliant in a suppliers shared virtualized environment.

Re: Ask YC: Colocation?

#17

Post by mileszs »

http://nframe.com hosted Monster.com (or part of it), until they chose to open their own facility. Finish Line is a colo customer, ChaCha is a customer, as well as many others. It is located a couple miles north of Indianapolis.

nFrame is owned by Continental Broadband, who also owns Expedient data centers (Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland), as well as DCs in Chicago, and a few others. http://continentalbroadband.com

Re: Ask YC: Colocation?

#19

Post by Kaizyn »

reidman wrote: post #13
davidw wrote: post #2

Why not just use something like linode?

We've been on dedicated servers for a long time, and we're at a point where cost-efficiency and flexibility are our two biggest factors. We're expecting pretty linear growth, so scaling isn't a huge deal. Up until now we would regularly switch to a better server, stay there until we outgrew it, and then jump again. It's kept us relatively lean/current and our costs have stayed low as the cost/quality of hosting has c…

Xen is open source: http://www.xen.org/ Why not install it on a test box in house and decide for yourself how well it fits your needs?

Re: Ask YC: Colocation?

#20

Post by hualibaobao »

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