Anything comment, tips or recommendation would be useful.
It could be info on company, location or services, or simply why or why not use collocation.
I am wondering if I should use a colo for 3rd alternate site....or even use it as primary site and demote the other 2.
Unfortunately, I don't have any experience using one.

 

are you speaking in terms of places like exodus?

it would really depend on the nature of your business I guess and if having that kind of colo is being used for fault tolerance or load balancing - and of course, justifying itself in expenses.

 

yeah, like exodus, xo, uunet, global center and a few others.....

 

no comments about any of them really. I've "heard" that exodus has been in a bit of financial trouble as well as local ISP's a) with the downturn of the tech market, people cannot afford to have tight colos with deisel generators, and b) with the flood of cable modems and DSL providers through your cable company/phone company which makes it convenient for anyone to use.

to do research if any at all, I would suggest two sites on this: 1) www.fvckedcompany.com (you need to change the v to a u for obvious reasons), and 2) www.deja.com - which is just a good source for clues to solutions in weird bugs and ISP/hosting/colo information as it just searches archives and archives of newsgroup information.

I will say this, exodus has some very nice tight security. Dr. Koop had a 'room' and not just a 'cage' or even rack space, but a "room" which ran upwards in the range of 250K a month or thereabouts - here in Austin.

 

Funny you ask because we just had a meeting with Meta yesterday and this exact topic came up. They said, and based on what I already have seen, is that a lot of providors will go away either through failure (read: Pilot Network Services) or consolidation. It'll only be the biggest players left - Probably IBM Global Services, Genuity, and the RBOC's (Verizon, etc.). These guys providing cheap hosting just can't afford to do it much longer.

One of the biggest problems right now was that most providors overbuilt, planning on the "continuing" tech boom, and are now stuck with excess capacity and tight corporate IT budgets. Not a good combo.

And for what it's worth, we looked at Exodus and did not go with them. I don't know the exact reason, but I believe it was a cash burn issue.

 

I looked into it, but it was just soo expensive, it almost seemed more practical to run a T3 directly into the office building.

 

heck, it might even be more fault tolerant to rent offices here and there with DSL lines for a small business. then again, it depends on your client base, your bandwidth requirements and what you are transferring.

 

Consider the criticallity of your site too.... we had just gotten out of a bad hosting situation after a 6 month migration plan. Our disaster recovery (DR) site was (still is) located in out office building. We have a small psudo-data center already on the first floor of the building which we put in a second set of computer gear. Wouldn't you know it, 1 week after we made the move, a computer caught on fire on the fifth floor. It was a small fire and was contained quickly by the one sprinkler head that popped. We had significant water damage down to the 3rd floor on the same side of the building as the data-center. I think either about 30 more minutes of water flow or one or two more sprinkler heads popping would have done our DR site in and we would have been completely off the web. Doh!

 

I'll give a shameless plug for my girlfriends company. You might want to check out Hostpro. I think they might offer some pretty good colocation packages.

www.hostpro.com

 

Are you guys playing that word game again?