Hunting for Colocation

April 19th, 2008 | by Sean |

While I might not be such a do-it-yourselfer around the house, I certainly am when it comes to the Internet.

Case in point: my email, web, and IRC infrastructure.

When I moved to Fort Collins, one of the first things I did was obtain a Comcast Business Class cable connection for my home. I did this for the purpose of running my own e-mail, web, DNS, and IRC servers on my own. Setting all this up was a marginal cost increase over a residential cable modem (due to the relatively inflated costs of Internet access in Colorado — thanks Qwest!) plus hardware.

However, like residential cable, business class still suffers from being a “best-effort” IP delivery service. Comcast likes to do “maintenance” at odd hours and this causes interruptions to my service. In at least two events over the last 3 months, my connection flapped wildly for hours at a time. This sort of behavior really isn’t conducive to running a reliable IT infrastructure, even if it is just for me (and a few others)!

So, I’ve decided to expand my scope and look for colocation. I have a 1U short-depth rack mount server that’s on its way and I’m looking to install it in a facility with a bit more data-oomph that I’ve got. I’ve looked at a lot of different companies throughout Colorado, including Front Range Internet, Red Rocks Data Center, EarthNet, RockyNet, and NeTrack. I’ve tentatively decided on NeTrack.

NeTrack offers the best bang for my buck: $75/month for the rack space and 200kbit (95th percentile) of bandwidth. However, I’m principally concerned over two things: 200kbit is probably too low to be sustainable and their slow/nonexistent response time to requests. I’ll saturate 75% of that 200kbit initially with my current traffic patterns and their bandwidth overage charges are very high. What I’d really like is someone who can provision me 512kbit (read: breathing room) and stay competitive with the $75/month rate. Native IPv6 would be a major plus, too.

I suppose I’m what you might call a high-powered IT hobbyist. :)

  1. 2 Responses to “Hunting for Colocation”

  2. By cthrax on Apr 20, 2008 | Reply

    I thought the first thing you did was fail to get local wireless internet. Oh, and complain about Qwest a whole bunch.

  3. By Sean on Apr 20, 2008 | Reply

    It’s true. I tried so very hard to avoid the RBOC and Cable company, but ultimately failed.

    Luckily, Comcast Business has worked out pretty well. Scaling up with a colocated server should be nice too.

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