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How to colocate your first server at a datacenter

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Re: How to colocate your first server at a datacenter

#4
post #3

How is it a “colocation” if it is your “first server”? In the age of on-line dictionaries no less?

A colocation center is a type of data center where equipment, space, and bandwidth are available for rental to retail customers. Colocation facilities provide space, power, cooling, and physical security for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms—and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers—with a minimum of cost and complexity.

Colocation by no means indicates you have multiple servers that need housing nowadays.

Re: How to colocate your first server at a datacenter

#5
Thanks for the article, I've seen that term floating around and never knew how to get started. I've been itching to get into the server hosting business as a side thing ever since renting my own KVM VPS.

I was blown away by the fact that I can sit there and watch it reboot over screen sharing from my iPad. I treat it as a cloud desktop (runs the latest vanilla Ubuntu) and so of course it was easy to get apache and PHP and Ruby and a whole web server environment up. I do all my work on it, as well as my play. I use Plex to stream myself media, and OwnCloud and other tools to replace Dropbox and even deploy sites.

I want to sell people on the idea that it's easy to have a cloud desktop you can access from anywhere, that can also be a web server (not selling web servers that can also have a desktop). I want to sell people on the Idea that with freely available software, we can each have a private cloud with just our data.

I'm not quite sure how to get started, and I'm not trying to make a killing with profit, I just don't see people trying to make it simpler for the average Joe to have a cloud desktop and not need to pay to use shared cloud services which then become huge targets for data breaches.

Re: How to colocate your first server at a datacenter

#7

Nice article, thanks, but does it applies to all types of the datacenters?

I can't see a type of datacenter it doesn't apply to. You pay for transit, power draw, and to a lesser extent rack units. If you get a rack or a half rack with your expected power draw and want to spill past that they'll be charging you extra because that's space they can't sell to someone else. Some datacenters also provide cages, so your hardware is physically separated from other people. That'll cost extra too.

The only thing I didn't see a mention of is DC power, whereas your out of the box power supplies on most OEM equipment is for AC. Most of the server supplies nowadays should be able to handle 240V, 208V, and 120V with AC on the same unit, when you go DC you want to consider buying a separate AC power supply for setting up the server in your office (unless you drop ship it to the colo).

Make sure you get a very efficient power supply too, because while you can get the most efficient or power miserly server on the planet, an inefficient power supply will increase the draw significantly. You also want to right-size the power supply, because drawing too little power lowers the efficiency (there's an efficiency curve available for most PSUs that are rated).

Re: How to colocate your first server at a datacenter

#8
post #6

What are the advantages of doing this over just paying for computing power on AWS or some other cloud service? Feels like it would be a very small niche at this point.

Cost: https://blog.serverdensity.com/saving-500k-per-month-buying-...

Re: How to colocate your first server at a datacenter

#9
post #6

What are the advantages of doing this over just paying for computing power on AWS or some other cloud service? Feels like it would be a very small niche at this point.

i think AWS is good, when you're not sure if you will use all resources of your servers or need scalability. If you know your growth rate, what type of resources are used, etc. it will be cheaper to have servers in a datacenter instead of using AWS. Many companies, upon growing, starting to rent a space in datacenter or even build their own.
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