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..
http://www.evocative.com/
Comment by Justin — September 21, 2012 @ 1:54 pm
I know the owner of SMH Colo here in Orange County: http://www.smhcolocation.com/ probably one of the best designed data centers in the US as far as strategic placement, and redundancy goes. Too bad its a 5 hour drive.
Comment by gchapman — September 21, 2012 @ 2:39 pm
I fired off an email to Evocative, SV web hosting got back to me – $172/mo. Another data center guy in the area says the facility SV web is in has a good reputation, no reply from hurricane electric yet. Orange County is a BIT too far that is true…closer than Seattle though!
I am going to 3PAR HQ in Fremont next Friday from 12-4pm , and my current co-lo is in Fremont, so considering trying to get it done either next Fri morning or Friday evening.
keep the suggestions coming!!
thanks!!
Comment by Nate — September 21, 2012 @ 3:06 pm
Hmm, decision time .. I got a quote back from Hurricane Electric, they have space in the same building my server is currently in so the move would be very easy from that perspective, though the price is double what I pay now. $200/mo for *7U* of space ~240W worth of power (can’t get more power without another 7U or getting a full rack for $600/mo), 100Mbit unmetered connection. $200/mo is a good price for that config, I just will have a hard time taking full advantage of it, given my needs are so low. I was thinking about leveraging the extra space and buying a couple Western Digital “My Book Live 1TB” and rotate them between home/colo, transferring 1TB of data via my cable modem would take 4 months, vs a short drive..
Evocative looks pretty good too and is the lowest cost of the three options at $119/mo, 10Mbit unmetered connection, 240W of power.
Then the first place I got a response from was $172/mo down in San Jose.
I’m leaning towards HE even though the cost is more, I get 10x more bandwidth, the move is really close, and I have more space to work with (thinking about tossing in a Soekris OpenBSD firewall in front of my system to protect my IPMI as well as ESXi management interfaces too. Perhaps even upgrade my server to one that has more drive bays, and change my processor to something more power efficient. BUT $200/mo is quite a bit of $$.
Comment by Nate — September 24, 2012 @ 12:19 pm
> Hurricane Electric
my condolences. maybe we can help you out next time? (see my email addr)
Comment by matt — October 3, 2012 @ 5:23 pm
[…] they gave me the news they were going to terminate their hosting and I had only two weeks to get out. I evaluated my options and decided to stay at the same facility but started doing […]
Pingback by The Myth of online backup and the future of my mobility « TechOpsGuys.com — August 10, 2013 @ 12:53 pm