Hi, I am a 17 year old senior attending Binghamton High School in Binghamton, NY. About a year ago I met a man that consulted a web design company in Denmark. Since then our ideas have grown outrageously. We have now turned into a managed web hosting provider. We're scheduled to launch sometime next month. We just signed a contract for a dedicated T1 line from Global Crossing to start off. I'm not worried about the bandwidth right now because if we grow I have the option of opening up 6 more circuits for a total of 9.28 Mbits/sec. I think that should be enough for now seeing that we don't have a full office yet. It's going to be running in the fully customized basement of my residence. The hardware is great, the lines are great, the knowledge is great and best of all we're going to offer a dedicated 24/7 support line. You can check out our alpha version of the website here:

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As soon as the line gets installed we're going to run it into a FreeBSD firewall, then to a switch, and then to the dedicated and shared servers. To start off I predicated we should have 2 shared servers, one running FreeBSD and one running Windows 2000 Server. Before I start and officially launch this business I'd like to know a bit about the environment I need to have these servers in. I'd like to know maybe a "how-to" on building raised floors. The basement of my residence varies in temperature throughout the seasons signifigantly from Winter to Summer here in New York. Any input would be very helpful and much apreciated. Please send me feedback.

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Thank you,
Greg Walker
greg@fozzy-networks.com

Why don't you colocate your servers rather than having them in your basement? It would be much more reliable, faster and have redundancy. Cheaper too.

What if the line goes down?
What if there is an electrical outage?
What if the server goes down while nobody's at home...for the week-end?

It would cost you a few hundreds dollars to colocate your server and you would have a better speed (an OC-3 will burst higher than a T1), most of the time redundancy, the NOC is secure (nobody will brake into it and destroy the servers!), and so on.

It's a great project, but the basement thing is not a great ida IMHO.

Good Luck,

Nice site. Looks great in IE, but is dead image link city in Netscape. Once it's Netscape friendly though it will be nice :)

very nice site design
but I kept thinking of "Fozzie Bear" from the muppets.

You should consider colocation. Besides reliability and redundancy, most data centers are housed in a cleanroom enviroment. A basic cleanroom has a raised floor, an independant filteration air handling system, seperate power, etc.

You can search the web for cleanrooms or try a customer web site http://www.lascoservices.com

A couple of small observations. I've had a look at the site and it looks very good. Reading some of the text give me cause for concern.

Unless I've missed something you've not yet started trading. How come the site has a customer testemonial on it? "Excellent service" but you haven't provided any service yet?

"Our data centers are directly connected to our state-of-the-art network"

data centers is plural and means basement.
State of the art network means a single cable connection.

Don't take this the wrong way but I think you may just be pushing the bounds of what I as a customer would think is reasonable.

I was talking to a local (UK) firm of web designers and decided to have a look at their site. http://www.internetdomainservers.co.uk/host/server_farm.htm

Suggests that they have a server farm in a £10M data center. When you read their site it talks about "our network" and "our servers" In reality they are resellers for Fasthosts and don't own any part of the service they are using.

OK, everyone loves to bull their service up but what are the limits?

Ya the site is our alpha version. Meaning that before we do in fact launch, we will acheive the success of at least building one full data center. That would be my next question, how much am I looking at for this, including all the air filtration, power redundancy generators, HVAC units, and sprinkler system?

Why would you spend the time and money building a data center in what I'm assuming is the basement of your parent's house?? Not only would it be easier/cheaper/faster/a better connection if you went with a colo, but you wouldn't loose the whole thing when you moved out. :)

If you build it there, you would either have to continue to bug your parents to get to your servers or build another one in the next place you live. Sounds crazy to me... unless of course you just want to be able to say you did it. :D

I think you are getting ahead of yourself. You can collocate with low bandwidth for less than $50 a month and with outstanding connectivity. Hosting management can be a big truck. You need to pull in so you can back out. It does not matter if you have excess funds or not. You do not seem to have the experience (no offense please) to make the decisions that will make your business uniquely yours. The days are gone when you can throw up a "me too" site. I would suggest you start as a reseller. You need to know that business. You might even want to provide it to your clients later. With a good reseller you have lots of technical help. After becoming proficient with managing accounts, then take managing your own server. Then after you have experience managing servers and technical staff (yes you will need help) and you have the growth, rent floor space. Forget owning your own building. It is an ego trip. It is my impression that most of the best providers do not own a building. Management takes time. You do not want to manage plumbing, AC, property taxes, etc, when your heart in with networking. Slow down. Not because you are not bright and can not go faster but because it is the smart thing to do. Get experience in the industry so that the opinions you rely upon are your own. The industry is not just knowing about computesr.

Oh, and bandwidth at this stage is not nearly as big a deal as reliability. Bandwidth can always be added but a good reputation can not.

In any event, good luck.

Projo
College is more than passing tests. Hosting is more than making a server serve.

Good advice. Well said!

If you have to ask "How much" to build a datacenter,

then you don't have the money to build one!

A sort of OK one is at least $250k
A bigger one is $500k

You can caculate it at around $200 per sqft

You want a 100 sqft NOC, thats $20,000
1000 sqft ? $200,000


3000 sqft ? $600,000


Since you haven't even recieved your first company, jump over to a resellers company and get a $20 package :) :) :) :)

I would reccommend co-locating. You can first off, save a lot of money. And it would be better for your customers.

prepay 1 year for colocation... it saves your customers from bad business times.

I would have to agree with everyone else.

Colocate! Why would you want to put your customers on a T1? I mean even 9, 10 15 T1 lines will be slow compared to the bandwidth you can get from a nice NOC. Also, like everyone else said, what about redundancy, security, etc, etc, etc????

Go ahead, build your own NOC in a basement and you will see that sooner or later you will run into problems.

Just a friendly suggestion. :)