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September 21, 2012

Need New Colo! NOW

Filed under: Datacenter — Nate @ 1:36 pm

UPDATE – I have finished my move! woohoo. This is my first visit to this Hurricane Electric facility it’s not really what I expected but it is an, interesting place. It seems to be entirely shared hosting, well at least the room I am in right now. All of the racks are the same and things look fairly uniform. I can tell the racks are pretty old tech, reminds me of the racks I used to have at Internap. I wouldn’t want to host mission critical stuff here, or expensive stuff, but for my little 1U box it is OK. There is a cabinet one cabinet away from mine in my row where they removed the rear door to fit the equipment in. They have a C7000 blade enclosure  and tons of CAT5 cabling all over the place,  totally not secure, but I guess people here are mindful which is good. They look to be running what I assume is a 120V 20A circuit based on the size of the power cable coming out of the PDU, and there is a little meter there on the PDU itself that reads 20 …  The PDU is ziptied to the rear of the rack because there is no place to mount it in the rack (they had to extend the rack rails to the max to fit the blades in). Anyways off I go…

 

[UPDATED] My hosting provider broke the news to me yesterday (but didn’t see the email till today) that they are terminating their co-location on Oct 1st. So I have to get out and find somewhere else to put my server (which hosts this blog along with my email, my DNS etc..).

I reached out to Hurricane Electric where my current provider hosts, as well as another place called Silicon Valley Web Hosting, which seems decent. If you know of another provider in the bay area (I want it local in case I have hardware issues), please let me know!

This is what I have today:

  • 1U Server
  • 1 network feed
  • 5 static IPs
  • 100Mbit unlimited bandwidth
  • $100/mo

I don’t use much bandwidth, I haven’t kept track in a while but I suspect it’s well below 100GB/mo.

SV Web hosting looks to cost about $170/mo for at a facility they are hosted at down in San Jose. I think I’d be OK up to $190/mo, beyond that I’d have to think harder about making more compromises.

I’d like to be hosted in a good facility, and am totally willing to pay more for it – no fly by night operations, nobody that attracts a lot of spammers/DOS attack type stuff.

I don’t need 100% uptime, network outages here and there aren’t a big deal, hopefully power outages will be really rare. Oh and no facilities that run on flywheel UPSs now that I’m thinking about power. Redundant power would be nice (my server has it), not required, redundant network would be nice, not required.

So if you know of any good places I should check out let me know!

(for those of you who may not know I did try the cloud route for a year while I was in between servers – it really wasn’t for me – especially now that I have 4TB of usable storage on my system for backups and stuff)

thanks

UPDATE – after some hard thinking I decided to go with Hurricane Electric, the same building that I am hosted in now so the move should be pretty painless. For $200/mo I get 7U of space, with 240W of power and 100Mbit unmetered bandwidth. I think the extra space will give me some flexibility, at some point I plan to get a pair of these, and rotate them between home and colo, 1TB is more than enough, with my ~1Mbit upstream it would take me 4 months to upload 1TB(the best upstream I can get is “up to 5Mbps” for an extra $55/mo – currently my “up to 1.5Mbps” seems to tap out below 1.1Mbps), vs a 30 minute drive and probably 12 hours of data copying with this method. Then probably either move my backup Soekris OpenBSD firewall or get another one so I can better protect the ESXi and ipmi management interfaces on my server (the VM that runs this blog already sits behind a virtual OpenBSD firewall).

Longer term I can see building a new server to replace what I have, something that is bigger, supports more disks, but still efficient enough to fit in that 240W power envelope. Longer term still who knows maybe I will upgrade to 100Mbps cable modem for $160/mo (currently pay about $45 for 16Mbps), and just store everything in my own little cloud. Stream everything..

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