Where can I colo one box in the SF Bay area?

November 14, 2006 4:40 PM

I need a recommendation for colocation space in the SF Bay area. Requirements and

I currently have a server hosted at my former employer's datacenter on the other side of the country. This is nice because it's free, monitored 24x7, and has loads of burstable bandwidth. Unfortunately, the employer may be moving their gear to a new location, and I suspect that at that point it'll be time for me to start paying for hosting again.

I like the fact that I own this box, I have root on it, and when I need to upgrade its hardware I just buy things at commodity prices and install them myself. If I have a problem with the hosting company, I can just go get the box and set it up somewhere else. That's what I'm looking for now in a replacement colo site - no shared servers or other nonsense like that. I suspect that this is going to be a little hard to find - I think most datacenters are more in the business of selling half or full racks worth of space to people. If I have to pay for some extra space to get the relative lack of service I want, so be it. Basically, I need:

- 24x7 physical access
- 24x7 techs on site for the rare time when I need someone to power-cycle my box
- Ability to let me host a single box, or at least only buy a few U of rack space
- Minimum 20 GB/month of transfer; option for more preferred

That's really it. I don't need monitoring, tech support, anything else like that. Obviously, with the exception of "minimum 20GB/month of transfer," I could just put this on a DSL line in my apartment :) Unfortunately, I'm also going to be hosting an internet radio station with a large number of streams.

The first critical point is reliability. Having my own box increases that a lot, so really they just need to have reliable bandwidth and power. The second critical point is price. If anyone knows of a place that can handle this, I'm all ears! I live in SF and work in Palo Alto, so proximity to those two cities is preferred.

posted by autojack to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Hurricane Electric has colocation facilities in San Jose and Fremont. I don't know what they cost, and if they sell colocation by the U rather then by the 1/4 rack. They have a request-a-quote form on their website.

ColoServe is based in San Francisco, and has prices on their website.

I haven't used either of those, these are just the ones I've heard of. I do know that HE has got quite a nice network.

(by the way, you usually don't need 24x7 techs on site if you've got a power port you can control remotely.)
posted by lodev at 11:58 PM on November 14, 2006

A sort of recommendation, and a few random thoughts on the subject...

Most real colo providers do Burstable Billing on 95th percentile and not gigs transferred per month. Note I define "real" providers as those that own their own datacenter.

Be leery of resellers. Yes they will be cheaper than the place they are buying from, but there is a reason for that. It has been my experience that these people (and I do mean people because they are often no more than two or three employees) can range from being quite good to quite awful. There are two problems that I have seen 1) Overcommitting bandwidth, power, and space 2) good networking is hard. Many resellers do not keep each customer on their own subnet for example.

Make sure you know what you need in terms of mounting on the rack. Most of HE's colo spaces only have front mounting points. And on those racks that do have four posts, not all rack rails or servers will fit in there easily.

I have loved Hurricane Electric, I started with them as a simple webhost in 1999 and upgraded to be a colo customer about three years ago. The smallest amount they will likely sell you is 512kbps and 7U of space for about $200/month. I am not so happy about the price, but their service has been great, I have never had an issue with reliability of the power or network connection.

Note that there are LOTS of resellers of HE's space. Fast Colocation
EGI Hosting
Hurricane Colo
Bay Colocation
. You can usually tell if the company is a reseller if they are clearly a small operation yet claim and amazing data center or international network. Or in the case of a few of the above, copy verbatim the text from HE.net's own pages.
posted by fief at 10:41 AM on November 15, 2006

Another thought

Remote power is a fairly expensive service to add for colo providers, particularly if they want to do it in an actually secure manner. I personally could care less about this feature since I build my servers to not need power cycling often enough to matter. 24/7 staff is more than adequate for my needs.

Argon Blue is also an HE reseller.
posted by fief at 10:52 AM on November 15, 2006