Why Is Colocation More Expensive Then Getting A Server
Oct 6, 2009
I've been shopping for colocation (1U) in South Florida and the prices I've been getting were much higher then if I would just lease a server at a datacenter. I thought you could save alot of money since you are only leasing space and bandwith.
I am used to paying costs such as $180 - $250 per month but my local colocation is charging $350 per month just for the bandwidth. Plus it is confusing how they price it they do not have a one set price for the whole month like normal hosts, they charge 1 MB per minute bandwidth average.
I currently run 16 boxes which I rent from various data centers, mark-up and resell. Conventional wisdom says that it's time for me to start colocating my own servers. I've got approval for capital (loan) so it's no problem for me to just buy these boxes and colo them. But... how the hell does anyone afford it?
I mean, I can get a cabinet in H.E. with 10Mbps burst to 100Mbps for $600/mo (through EGI). Which is an insanely good deal until you realize that it only includes 15amps of power. So (I think) that means that I can really only run about 15 or 20 Celerons at the most. So much for filling up the rack.
Optimistically, if I can run 20 Celerons which I've priced at about $700 each including shipping -- plus a switch, KVM, spare parts and bank interest over 24 months -- that's about $800/mo for the servers plus $600 for the cab, plus about $200/mo for remote hands in case I need the DC guys to do something. I'm looking at about $80/mo per server which I have to pay whether it's rented or not.
I can easily find celerons for $80/mo which include some level of support and I can very easily cancel whenever my client does and buy a fresh new one whenever I get a new client.
I was all excited to go colo -- but the numbers don't add up. What am I missing here? What's the big advantage to all the extra hassle of owning your own?
From reading these boards for a couple years now, I always had the impression that colo was cheapest in Texas or thereabouts, and was priciest in places like NYC. (Of course, I'm referring to relatively comparable service.)
Now I finally have a need for a single server colo (1U). The most-mentioned places in Texas on these boards are cologuys, colo4dallas, etc. Most of them have reasonable rates listed right on their website, around $100-170 for the bandwidth that I need, about 1.5Mbps.
But I've also been requesting quotes from various providers in NYC, who are also popular on these boards. And while there are some in the $200-250 range, which is what I was expecting, there are some that are mentioned highly on these boards (toqen, thenynoc, razorblue, etc.) that are quoting $60-100/month for the same amount of bandwidth.
I.e., not only comparable but in fact *lower* than the Texas colos.
What am I missing here? It's very possible that I'm comparing apples to oranges, cuz I really don't know any of these businesses. Just forming an opinion based on what gets recommended here on a consistent basis.
I wanted a completely fully managed server -- meaning everything is taken care of and I do not have to hire a server admin -- what would be the least expensive pricing from a reputable hosting provided?
I'd really like to find a Hyper-V VPS provider (or a Xen/ESX provider) and I've been stunned thus far to see each provider charging more for Hyper-V than Virtuozzo (e.g.
VPSland and Crystal Tech.). Why does this surprise me? Well, Hyper-V is included with the OS, whereas Virtuozzo is an extra cost. You might say, "But yeah, Virtuozzo gets around having to have a separate license for each OS install since its actually just one OS." Actually, that's not true, Microsoft clarified their licensing position and said that each instance does need a license. I'm guessing most hosting providers know this...So why the price hike?
is Blue Square now starting to get too expensive for some if not most webhosts that dont already have a large customer base?
I can remember about 6 months or somthing back when rack space would to be around ~£580 for 42u but now its at £700 thats with 8amps and no transit.
Bluesquare is known to be a very good and still is a nice alternative than london, however I think now london has become a cheaper alternative, what do you guys and gals think?
Yes I understand the need to charge more as the data centre fills up to capacity, and to pay for BSQ3-4 which are opening soon etc but im just curious about what do people think etc, im not having a moan they do and still do a brilliant service regardless of price.
Ive been comparing prices from between montreal bandwidth and toronto bandwidth and i dont see why there is a HUGE difference in price.. Could anyone clear this up for me ?
I am looking to co-locate a server in the toronto area but everything is like $100 for ~160gig of monthly bandwidth.
For the last few weeks I have been looking around at various colo and dedi offers here and there because I was thinking of saving some money by colocating a server and I noticed that everyone who offers both colo and dedi have things fixed so that the colo is much more expensive than renting a dedi from the same people in the exact same datacenters!
You would think that since a brand new server costs between $500 and $2500 to build or buy that amortizing of the cost of the hardware would make the dedis more expensive but in fact the opposite is true 90% of the time and only rarely does a host offer a colo plan that even matches their dedi plans. There are exceptions, like FDC for example but most of the time when you sit down and look at the price per mbps and the price per amp the colocation for a standard 8GB/quadcore/500GB server doing 2 TB of bandwidth is more just in monthly rental than if you rented a dedi(that the company owns).
So, in other words if I am renting a dedi with 8GB RAM, Quadcore CPU, 500GB hard drive with 5000 GB bandwidth quota on a 100mbps uplink for $125 to $150 a month and I wanted to save money by swapping it out with my own dedi of the same specs I would right away lose the cost of the dedi and then each month lose even more just in the colo fees along.
So what exactly is going on here? Are hosts overselling their dedis and making losses on a few but profits on most? And then on top of that artificially bloating their colo prices to encourage people to rent dedis instead? Or...do they just bloat colo prices out of fear and expectation that anyone who colos will be blasting their servers to the max and sucking up the mostest amps while using all the bandwidth that they buy?
A major part of web hosts are running linux these days, with congestion control mechanism 2.6 kernel and windows 2008 are now able to get full speed over higher latency even 200+, with the DSL an all major part of countries access to internet has been easy.
Now question is how exactly an expensive carrier such as MCI/ATT can make a difference for a website. expensive i mean by anything over $10 per mbit. Am sure for things like mission critical, financial institutions and for websites who need reach for every corner of 3rd world countries would need the best of the breed bandwidth. ok for the others who is always a regular guy or small business, is the expensive provider worth it? am trying to find out. please write your opinions on cheap/medium/expensive providers worthness of using such.
Internap is whole different as it will make a bandwidth mix superior which bgp can not do.
I'm looking for a managed server (mid range specs) and approximately 20TB monthly bandwidth.
I'm looking for reasonably priced hosts, that have a reputation "very similiar" to Rackspace.com. I don't want to quite pay what Rackspace's pricing looks like. So, I'm looking for something slightly cheaper than Rackspcae, but that have a VERY good record for promptness in addressing issues and with proven uptime records.
So far I am considering Verio & The Planet. My knowledge of hosts beyond that is very limited. Please point me in the right direction as to where I can find hosts with SOLID records like Rackspace.com, but are slightly less expensive.
Is bandwidth going to be my most expensive cost if I open up a video hosting site? Is there a inexpensive alternative? Is there an inexpensive web host with low cost bandwidth allocation?
I am planning to make my hands dirty by buying couple of server which can host one server with hits upto 10000 hits per day and another one to host to have shared hosting.
Could you please give some guidance about the type of server that I need to buy and I also need a good colocation service in london area which can offer 100 MBPS with unlimited bandwidth. (May be I am stupid here in asking about the bandwidth).
I just got my own server that I am colocating at a datacenter. It's a 1U rackmount server with Ubuntu 9.04 and I've been given the two IPs, Gateway, Subnet, and DNS information from the datacenter. They said it must be preconfigured, as I'm shipping it to them. However, I'm not familiar with how I can set it up and make sure it's working alright before I ship it off. The biggest thing I need to make sure is that I can at the very least access SSH but I'd prefer to be able to connect to remote desktop.
Is there any colo services on certain datacenter that allows me to send only a server and host it on there? (If there is, anyone know if any datacenter in SG [Singapore] allows that?) I'll be only hosting a website on it, and this way will probably save me more money than buying a dedicated server.
I have a few questions I hope some of the more experienced server admins can answer with regards to setting up a new colo box.
A quick background, we started our site out on a shared server and moved to semi-dedicated when we launched our sister site earlier this year. It's met our needs up to this point.
Our application architecture is currently based on a custom PHP built content management system. We're migrating this platform to a Java (JSP) based architecture using Struts 2 and Hibernate, scheduled to go live later this year. We've got quite a few reasons for this, familiarity with the language for our team, ease of maintenence (the system has grown very large in terms of code), and a few other key features that are much easier to do in a Java/JSP environment over PHP (multi-threading, parallel socket communication, etc).
We've decided we're going to co-locate a server, we're looking at purchasing a 1U rackmount system. We're on a very tight budget, and would like to pick up a second-hand server. We'll be running Windows Server 2003 as the OS, as nobody on our side has the knowledge to manage a Linux Web Server, and we're all developers familiar with the Windows platform. We also already have a Windows 2003 Standard license from an old internal test server that would work perfectly.
The server will be running the following:
-Windows Server 2003
-Jetty Servlet Container
-Hosting two Struts 2 Based Web Applications (one per domain)
My question is, based on your experience, what would you recommend as the minimum hardware we should be using for such a setup? Assume the webapps receive medium traffic (50K pageviews/day each), and are well-designed and fairly lightweight.
We're currently looking at an older system with the following specs.
HP DL360 G3 1U Server Dual Xeon 3.06Ghz (w/512K Cache) 2GB RAM Redundant Power 2x 36GB SCSI U320
Do you think this system would meet our requirements? Given the age of the Xeon processors and the vast range of models, I'm having a really hard time figuring our how this would compare to a more modern system. I'm assuming, based on the reviews, the G3 series was released in 2002 or 2003?
Does anybody know of a datacenter somewhere in Massachusetts that would allow me to colo a tower server along with a sonicwall SSLVPN and firewall? I need maybe 1,000 - 2,000GB/month transfer on a 10mbit port. Ideally under $100/month.
I live in Philadelphia, and I'm looking to find a good colocation nearby. I just have one 2U server right now that doesn't use too much bandwidth (webserver with one site), but my needs will increase over time.
401 Broad St. has the main colocation companies for the city, but most only deal in full cabinets. quonix.net and dca.net are a couple places I've found that would take just one server and charge accordingly.
I have a website and I need to run a colocation server but coudnt find anywebsite to buy servers. Do anyone know anygood website where I can buy powerfull servers with resonable price?
In me effort to go colo I have been studying as best I can different server builds. Here is some information you may want to know or be able to help me and others with.
Quest: Build a server designed for serving html and other uses as a webserver (mail, database, etc). Limux operating System
Chipset- Although I found a lot of good and bad motherboards, I could find no information regarding chipsets and Linux. maybe it does not matter, who knows? Also..upgrading motherboard and chipset AFTER server is up and running seems like a challenge.
Harddrives- It would seem best to get a harddrive made for a 24/7 uptime. Not ALL drives are like this. Seemingly, unconfirmed, SCSI drives are for this pupose. However, Western Digital has made some 'RE' drives that are to be up 24/7 with no issues. Note: 7200+ rpm drives appear to fail more often and some suggest a more stable 5400rpm.
Built in NIC vs Adding one- Very little could be found on this, but would assume a much better one should be bought and not use an onboard one. Some onboards can have probelm with some linux distros too. I would buy one and add it...a good one.
CPU- very little talk was available on linux's use of multiple CPUs. Very little talk was available on speed and use of multiple versus single cpu units. Example- how would a single cpu of 3ghz do against 2 CPUs of 1.8ghz. Having two CPUs does allow for a server to utilize different CPUs for different processes, so if one is busy, the other can be used. No information was really available on the difference..or what you should buy for the actual CPUs.
RAM- Buttloads of ram out there. No info on what works best with linux, which works best for a server, or what kind would work best for a server.
Motherboard- many are available and many suggest different kinds, but no definitive reasons have been given. No idea which would be best for a linux web server.
Control panel versus no control panel - after a little learning curve it would appear a non control panel is easy to use for a single user server. Control panels are buggy, have many issues, but do allow multi user systems and shared servers to be easily used. Some seem very limited in the updated versions of software. I will be going with fedora, but no control panel. The overhead is not something I want to deal with..or the bugs, or the old software, of the issues of upgrading. Ensim and cpanel seem most used and professionally serviced.
Raid- Just working on this one. No real info as to the best type of raid card for a linux webserver. Raid 1 is a mirror system i believe that allows you to have two drives where one is a ghost of another (sort of)? Do not know how much this slows the system or the drives down, but a mirror would be best in the case of a failure. Do not know what happens when there is a failure (will system freeze, ignore it, hang?)
Partition of drives: It would seem that putting the linux system on one aprtition, the /home directory on another, and perhaps the mail directory on another is a way to make it easier to deal with certain issues. If you need to compile, reinstall, or whatever with linux and all your data is not on the partition, it becomes easier. If a partition gets screwed, the data is spread out, so much can not be destroyed. The actual amounts for the partitions are not evident in my research.
ANyway, that is a synopsis of info I have been perusing these last few days. Usually you can only find someone talking about something they use and like, but no real details to balance out why something else will not be as good.
One other note: Distros of llinux are all over the place. But for a webserver I do not think any distro is really needed. Perhaps just building your own kernel would be good (and a great learning experience)...but that remains to be seen.
I will be posting a web page in the coming weeks with a detail of how I built, where i bought, and how I installed, my new server here.
I'm colo'ing my first server, and I'm a little nervous about sending my server to the mainland (I'm in Hawaii) for colo. I was looking at Pacific Rack, and also at iWeb. Can anybody comment on these or recommend anybody else? I just need very basic 1U colo.
Dependability and low ping times from Hawaii are my main priorities. Preferably something that Time Warner is tied into since most Hawaii residents use Road Runner cable modems.
I'm going to be running a dedicated zimbra server.
Is there a good dedicated server company that has fast guaranteed turn ups, allows colocation, a private network, and is outside the midwest?
I want to colo my database server(s), firewalls, and switches but then use dedicated servers as web servers. Hopefully allowing me to add web servers very quickly as needed (someone getting /.'d). I would want the webservers on a private network only.
This is probably a dumb question, but I've been curious about something. While shopping around for either a cheap dedicated server (less than $75/mo) or a cheap colo for a 1u server, I have noticed that the cheap dedicated servers are often less than a cheap colo, which seems odd to me since with a colo you bring your own machine.
For example, Sago Networks has cheap dedicateds for $50, $59, $79 etc. yet their cheapest colo option is $99. For Sago's $50 dedicated you get 1000GB transfer and 2 IP's, and with their $99 colo you get only get 100 GB transfer and 1 IP.
And Sago is not unusual in this respect. I've priced other providers that fall into this category and they have similar differences.
So why is colo more expensive than dedicated for similar, if not lower, features?
When a colo vendor can consider themselves as a managed colocation provider? What make them different than *normal* colo service?
If you need a managed colo, why not go with managed server? With managed server, your vendor will take care about the server health, including software and hardware too
(I am mentioning to fully managed server vendors like Rackspace, don't tell me cheap managed servers)
Is there a "premium" for colocation space in cabinets which are taller than 42U? I'm putting some cabinets into a datacenter cage, which I will lease to 3rd parties as colocation cabinets, and there is plenty of height below the ceiling (about 290 cm). I could put in 42U cabinets, but I could go taller, up to about 48U.
The cabinets will have about 10 kW delivered to them (8 kW usable per cabinet), but the UPS is sized for an average load of 5 kW per cabinet. Cabinet depth is 1200 mm. There will be cable tray 10 cm above the cabinet.
If you were going to colo 5 kW of equipment (average) per cabinet, would 48U cabinets have value to you over 42U high cabinets?