I don't know exactly what our hosting and colo packages run, but I do know that we run a tight ship in the NOC here at Genuity.

During that Houston rain fiasco, we still had commerical power in our POP. The rest of the block was dark. Heck, most of the area was dark.

Oh. I almost forgot. MCI's POP in the basement had um...hydration problems. We stayed dry above ground.

Temin

 

It all depends on what you are doing and what you need in terms of bandwidth (sustained vs. peak) and rack space. More details would be good.

The colo market sucks big time right now. I think you will need to choose a company that has more going for it that simply server rental and colo services. I got a notice from our old colo company that they went into Ch. 11 (eSpire/ValueWeb). I expect many others to follow.

This can be both good and bad. If you choose a company that offers little but datacenter services you may find yourself without any service. However the sagging market will allow you to drive a very hard bargain. Lots of empty racks out there.

S2KI is with a large local ISP that gets most of it's revenues from DSL and T1 type service. That's good and may help them ride out the storm. Others, notably RackSpace et al. are in serious trouble. They have been selling at a loss for a long time with the idea that volume would drive profits. They didn't allow for the volume to stop half way to the goal. Any company that isn't profitable now, won't ever be.

Before you can decide you need to analyse your traffic as it sits right now. There are a number of tools to do this MRTG is very good and what I use. There are scripts you can use to calculate your 95th percentile from the data collected. The 95th percentile is how colos charge. They sample your port every five minutes and drop the top 5% of the samples. You are charged based on the peak that is left. This is why is it important to do the analysis. If you run at 1Mbps 6% of the time, that's what you will be charged for. The cost of bandwidth can far outweigh the rack charge (it stays constant).

So let's say you buy 1Mbps for $800 (which is high BTW, I pay $575) and all is going fine. If they sample every 5 minutes (almost all do) that's 8640 samples/month. They will drop the highest 432 and you will pay based on the highest peak that's left (not the average, be careful). So they give you 36 hours of free peak each month. If you run a big promo and you peak at 5Mbps for a total of 48 hours that month, you pay for 5Mbps. That's 5x what you signed up for so don't be surprised if your bill is also 5x what you expect.

There is always a break even point. If you contract for 1Mbps and use 1.5Mbps it is still less than buying 2Mbps. One way to control your costs is to use bandwidth restriction (traffic shaper for Linux) or QoS. Set it for the break even point, say 1.6Mbps and you can be assured you will never get a monster bill. You will however limit your peak output to the same level. Monitor your traffic religiously and stay on top of it.

Again, don't colo unless you analyse your current traffic first. Know your bandwidth and never become lazy about it.

 

When I worked for a bank we kept our web server at Concentric. We had a good relationship with them. They were far away. But the were fairly reachable. My new company uses Verio, but we maintain our servers ourselves there. I don't like Verio, but when we have problems we can blame them

 

Here is a graph of the daily bandwidth for the S2KI server. This tool is available at http://www.cheshire.demon.co.uk/pub/ and is called routers.cgi

[img]/cthree/traffic.png[/img]

The average is 529Kbps but the 95th is 979Kbps

 

I guess I can always get non burstable connection so it won't go over a certain amount......
But again, if I just want 1.5mbps sustained rate, it only cost me 400 bucks to get the DSL line. (and I am getting that one already)
The main reason for a colo would be the possibility of 100mbps or at least 10 mbps burst.

As far as the financial situation of those data centers, I wasn't aware of it. That's why I posted a message here!! See, it helps

 

Hey, that means you can host this site on a 1.5 Mbps and it will still be good most of the time.

 

Colo has be done so much that is has become a commodity, hence all the financial problems for those selling it.

Have you looked at fully managed hosting? These companies take care of all the daily maintenance and upkeep allowing you to focus on your code.

It just happens that I work for a managed hosting provider and would love to help (wink, wink)

Zoinks@HighIQ.com

 

True but there are advantages to having the burstable capability. Notice the spike at noon? It allows me to serve all the requests quickly without requiring a full 3Mbps all the time. Hence the need for analysis and monitoring when using a colo.

The other thing a colo gets you over a fixed link is redundancy. My own experience with DSL has been mixed. You get a single link which goes up and down weekly and subject to other problems like power outages, digging in the area and so forth. These aren't financial until you try to build this reliability in yourself. Redundancy is expensive so spreading out the cost between a large number of sites makes it more affordable.

It may or may not be important in your application. If your site is out for an hour or two a week or month it may not be an issue. If this site was out for that kind of time I suspect there would be a drive by shooting at my house. Reliablility has been an issue in the past and the foundation of S2000Online when it started. So to me it has been and will continue to be paramount but every situation is different.

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We've had 0 network or hardware related outages since October 8th 2000 when the site went online. There was some downtime related to maintenance, configuration and exponential growth but it has been minimal and infrequent.
[/horn toot]

Hope this helps

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BTW, if anyone would like to hire me to design or analize your setup, I'm available
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