Anyone interested in colo'ing their own server?

[SaintHax]

I'm considering buying some rack space where I work and a small amount of bandwidth to start with. I was wondering if anyone would want to colo their own server and help offset some of the cost, I get a discount but I still can't justify spending that much on my own right now when i don't 100% need it yet.

General details of the datacenter:

2 datacenters, on different floors of this 21 story building
7Gbits of optical connections to the world
4 Cisco 6500 series routers with a wave division 4Gbit redundant ring between them, can lose 3 and still stay online. 2 onsite, 2 offsite, 4 seperate locations
Cisco 3550 Layer 3 switches that do internal routing and switching
4 massive battery backups and a 1.5Megawatt Generator w/1500 gallons of onsite fuel
A little over 2000 servers are housed here, and I have unrestricted access to everything considering I'm one of the engineers :D
I spend a lot of time here so I'm a short walk away from any server problems and I don't have to go through support channels if my stuff breaks when I'm not around :D

Candice (can) has seen this place...it's not the corner of someone's basement

I'm not in a huge rush I'm just planing out what I'm going to do, so if anyone is interested drop me a PM or something...

[can]

its pretty massive, and the battery backups look like they could power my house for a couple of days.... :eek:

[Cozmo D]

What does colo mean?

[SaintHax]

colocation... you send your own server whatever specs and I plug it up in the data center then you run it.

[Cozmo D]

Now why does that explanation not clear a damm thing up for me? :D

[can]

haha

[SaintHax]

Now why does that explanation not clear a damm thing up for me? :D

you can lease a server and host websites, streaming music, whatever...OR you can use your own server and do the same thing, in the end you still own your server and have more flexabilty with what you can do with it.

In my case I'd much rather colo my Dual Xeon 3.0 server with SCSI drives for X amount than lease a server with the same specs for X amount and end up paying more for the leased hardware that I'll never own anyway.

[can]

its like the difference between leasing a car, and buying one, i think ? :confused:

[xtristessax]

what is this language you are speaking?!?!?!

[Cozmo D]

So how much are we talking for what? :confused:

[Harmeister]

I second coz. I'm interested (I have three separate websites that I would like to colo), but need to know the cost.

[SaintHax]

maybe $50 or so for the space, power, and 100GB of bandwidth? a meg of bandwidth is $99/mo retail, and I can get it cheaper...I just need to check how cheap.

I'd also prefer rackmount servers as I plan to get a small locking cabinet at first.

When I get the ball rolling on my plans I'm putting several of these on the rack/cabinet for resale with Celeron CPU'shttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16856101529 and some of these with P4's and hot swap SATA RAID http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16856101533

Also my Dell PowerEdge 1750 is going in the cabinet for normal web hosting.

So if you guys build servers please go for rack mount cases, or if you use a tower please don't send some 3ft tall 100lb monster.

not really looking to make a profit or anything I just want to trim some of the cost of my setup, your price would never increase unless you guys want to buy a load of bandwidth and run wild.

I'd like to get to the point of buying an unmetered 10Mbit (3200GB's/mo) connection and running off that for awhile, it's $400/mo (retail) then it won't matter what you guys are doing since there won't be any overages, but that plan is a bit further off.

Retail price to colo a 1U (1.75in thick) rackmount server at my DC is $99/mo for 1 Mbit of bandwidth which is about 300GB a month and $25/mo for 1U of rackspace, and 8 IP's (5 useable). So that's $124/mo for a base setup that is only 1U of rack space

I'm thinking about $50/mo for 100GB (not a big deal if you use more), a few IP's if you need more than 2-3 just ask, and you can use my discount on monthly control panel licenses for cPanel and Plesk and/or Windows server licenses. once I have some extra money for it I'm also going to add an APC remote reboot switch to the rack, so you can power cycle your server remotely if it crashes or something. There will also be a server in the cabinet for storing backups of my other servers, so if you guys want to send your backups to it I'll give you an account on it.

My webserver uses a little under 90GB's a month so sharing a 1Mbit line for awhile should be fine...btw it's not capped at 1Mbit, it's just the rate that I've commited to paying for, we can burst up to 100Mbit's if traffic load demands it.

[Cozmo D]

I understand the reasoning for paying that much for the rackspace, in order to have your own server. I just don't understand why you have to pay so much for the bandwidth. I see webhosting plans offering that amount of bandwidth monthly for a year for what you are paying for a month. :confused:

[SaintHax]

with webhosting they are overselling the server X times over and usually pack the damn thing full before leasing a new server.

There's one customer we have that has 5300 accounts on the server and always puts in support tickets because his customers are complaining it's slow...I'm like comeon we don't have a magic wand or anything stop whoring out the server.

When you lease a server with 1000GB of bandwidth we KNOW only 1 out of 20 customers will probably use that amount so we oversell the network by X amount. When you colo and buy X amount of bandwidth we know that you're buying that amount because you probably intend to use it to it's max before buying more. Plus in a colo setup you're plugged directly into a primary distribution switch and not sharing the 100Mbit uplink with a rack of other servers and there is no limit on hardware specs or monthly fees for upgrades like RAM and drives.

It's two different setups with two different solutions, I'm doing is because it will come out much cheaper for me after I get 2-3 servers online and I own the servers so I'm not paying monthly for hardware.

[Cozmo D]

Ahhhh...ok. :)