Anyone know of any data centers in the region (NC and neighboring states) that offer decent 1U / half-rack rates with great bandwidth prices?

Unmetered low priority bandwidth is specifically what I'm looking for and I'd rather avoid having to haggle with the datacenter salespeople to determine what their bottom dollar is.

Probably can't be avoided, but if anyone knows of any spectacular deals with regional providers I'd like to hear about it.

[Edited on May 27, 2009 at 11:07 AM. Reason : .]

5/27/2009 11:04:52 AM

i wonder what this could be for...

5/27/2009 11:20:19 AM

nice thread. More generally, I'd be interested in hearing more about people's experiences with datacenters as opposed to "consumer" webhosting. My hosting needs have always been easily met by my dreamhost account, but I've been trying to understand datacenter services better in the event that I need one someday.

I know in Charlotte, companies I've worked for have used Peak10, but I'm not sure how closely their strengths meet your specific needs

5/27/2009 11:20:34 AM

it aint regional, but I was happy with ev1 (formerly rackshack) although it looks like they got swallowed up by another service :/

5/27/2009 12:36:36 PM

I recently had to go from regular consumer hosting to a VPS which I'm testing now. It may not work out even that way, so I've been looking into dedicated server/colo services preferably in Charlotte.

I wish I could just host shit at home but business class road runner than has enough upstream costs in the neighborhood of $Galaxy.

5/27/2009 12:41:15 PM

Quote :

"it aint regional, but I was happy with ev1 (formerly rackshack) although it looks like they got swallowed up by another service :/"

Rackshack became EV1 became ThePlanet.com

I don't know anything about their colocation, and it doesn't really meet your requirements, but I know they've got a data center in Texas and are currently offered a Celeron 2.0 on an unmetered 10MB connection for $99 a month. Doesn't

5/27/2009 12:42:04 PM

at GameVee we used Peak10 and server beach in VA (i think it was VA) as a caching server.

5/27/2009 1:00:16 PM

We use hosted solutions

5/27/2009 1:40:54 PM

So it looks like the northern VA / DC area is probably the best bet as it's a regional peering point. I'm thinking we may just get a couple hundred megabit of leased transit and a gigabit port on one of the public peering exchanges around there -- seems like all of the data centers have public peering services.

Unmetered 10mbit is pretty much out of the question, and most of the low-end leased boxes are a bit too slack on storage for our needs. Europe seems to be pretty hot for leased dedicated servers and that's where all of ours are right now. In fact I haven't seen any US providers that come close to competing, though providers in several European countries are fairly comeptitive with eachother.

Right now we're using 100Mbps unmetered lines for each of our boxes, and as I understand it the provider is putting 24x 100Mbps ports on a 1Gbps uplink. I'm not sure how much (or if) they're overselling beyond that point. I'm wondering if we can't get similar bandwidth in the US, throw our own white boxes on in a half-rack, and gain more control over our network and hardware in the process.

So far from what I've gathered either US providers are enjoying much fatter margins than the European providers, or bandwidth is significantly more expensive here. The difference between rates advertised publicly on the providers' sites and the rates they'll negotiate to or advertise on forums such as WHT leads me to believe they're whoring for margins more aggressively than their European counterparts. e.g. TranquilHosting advertises $200/mo on their website for 1U colo and $79/mo for 1U colo on WHT, and even the "special" isn't very competitive.

5/27/2009 2:02:51 PM

you'd want something in the DC/VA area anyway for proximity to MAE East

5/27/2009 4:00:50 PM

Most of the "unmetered" specials you see on dedicated servers are for low-end hardware and on pretty high oversubscription - for instance, 24 servers on a 1Gbps port as you said.

why are you looking for something in a neighboring state? for optimal latency to RDU, or do you plan on driving to visit your server? I'd recommend finding a good provider out of state that has good remote hands support. that will open up your search criteria

how reliable does this need to be? fdcservers.net in chicago has great pricing on bandwidth for co-lo but they seem to have a few outages per year.

yellowfiber.net is a good smaller provider in the ashburn area that does co-lo, you could email them

5/28/2009 2:14:17 PM

The idea was hopefully to find a data center close enough where remote hands wouldn't be necessary, but it doesn't appear that bandwidth availability in the region makes that feasible. There are also certain concerns about the legal climate here in the US that make it unattractive.

Outages are generally not something we can deal with, depending on the length of the outage. A few minutes here and there probably wouldn't be noticed, but anything getting into the neighborhood of an hour or more would result in more support inquiries and negative image than we'd like.

In fact we have looked at fdcservers.net for their dedicated servers in the past, which can almost be configured competitively with some of the European providers, but at least the advertised rates for their colocation seem fairly high at $169 for 1U if I recall.

So I think we've narrowed it down to a data center on AMS-IX at this point, assuming bandwidth volume and price are related there's good reason to believe we'll get the lowest bandwidth prices there.

5/30/2009 12:27:13 AM