I'm looking for a TOP QUALITY data center to put in a few Rack-based servers for my company.

What I'm mainly looking for is quality customer support, reasonable pricing, a secure data center and GOOD, FAST connectivity!!!

Thanks!

Any suggestions are greatly appeciated.

Good customer support?
There is very minimal support for co-location.

And you might want to moce into offers...

Originally posted by Xenon210
I'm looking for a TOP QUALITY data center to put in a few Rack-based servers for my company.

What I'm mainly looking for is quality customer support, reasonable pricing, a secure data center and GOOD, FAST connectivity!!!

Thanks!

Any suggestions are greatly appeciated.

Take a look at http://www.affordablecolo.com , seems to be what you are looking for.

As creid suggested, consider moving this to the "Web Hosting Requests" section.

k - Thanks.

Take a look at the special offers forum for ******!!!

If you are planning on colo and would like access to yours servers, your bio says you are in Canada, have you considered a Canadian company close to where you are currently located?

I recommend Ardent Communications (www.ardentcomm.com)

Be prepared to pay additional fees for any support you require.

Most are currently charging $100-150 per hour for tech support on co-located servers. And many charge the same rate on leased servers.

Added: This is one of the factors you should discuss and have in writting in the contract before you sign the contract.

Many consider 3 day support to be adequate, we require 4 hour response time on our servers. At $150 per hour we do not believe we should wait three days to have our server problems resolved if a problem occurs.

We also have service contracts on all our servers with a 4 hour response time. Expensive but it is worth it if you have a server that is 500 miles away go down with 200 clients on it. They don't want to hear any 3 day nonsense.

Fortunately it is rare for a server to have a problem that we can not resolve remotely or that is not covered by the service contract so we seldom pay the $150 per hour for NOC tech support.

I agree with the general advice being given here...

If you co-locate, you should AVOID needing support on your server itself. You should take care of all the OS, hardware, etc. -- otherwise you are going to go broke. You may as well lease a server (which typically comes with that support).

Co-location hardware remote
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Personally given that most co-location providers charge $100 an hour or more to do work on your server -- and that is mostly SOFTWARE work - if you hard drive fails, CPU fan fails, or other hardware problem - you likely aren't going to get an ISP to take care of your server....

Personally, I keep a spare server here at my office... and if my remote co-located server has too big of a problem, I just swap it out. It costs about $70 to $140 to overnight a 1u server via UPS to anywhere in the country. Have it 95% configured (all but the final config). That is less than the cost of 1 hour of labor. I go with ISP's who don't charge to swap systems in/out of a rack (not like I'm going to have them do this more than once or twice a year).

The spare server is just part of the cost of co-locating to me. Wasting a buch of money on phone calls and remote support will kill the savings.

To me - you should only co-locate if your server has special operating system or configuration requirements -- hence some ISP staff person isn't going to know all the details of your system. If your system is simple, they you should be leasing and not co-locating anyway :)

How do you plan major upgrades, etc?

The biggest advantage I have co-locating
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Why do I co-locate? So that I can have multiple sites with the same hardware! If I have a server with one ISP, I can have the same server with another ISP... and my spare is the same server again. This ensures I don't have surprises with upgrades / failures / etc -- I have one of those systems right in front of me (my spare).

If you lease servers, the brand/model of the server is pretty much a grab-bag. One ISP might use name brand, another does home-built jobs... and matching disk layout and other aspects on the servers can be a pain.

Of course, with today's hardware costs getting so low -- co-location is not winning against dedicated (leasing). Considering the cost of shipping and labor to build up the server is fixed...

You need to verify that leased server has tech support in the lease.

Dialtoneinternet, for one, charges an hourly rate for technical support on their leased servers, currently $95 per hour unless the problem occurs after business hours, which it always does. And that is for 3 day turn around, not 24 hour or less.

Alabanza provides free tech support, but it takes 3 days or more to get a response. Plus their server fees are so high that you are really paying for the tech support whether you need it or not.

I will not get into a debate on leased vs. owning servers. We have done both and have decided to buy our servers from this point on. This gives us control of the server and server software, which is a problem with some leased servers, Alabanza for one.

The key is to determine how tech support and other issues are handled before you sign the contract. After you sign the contract it is too late.

Hi, I've been using RackMy.com for around 6 months now and only have good things to say. No problems at all. Extra memory installed for free (I paid for the memory and had it shipped to them). Fast response to my stupid newbie questions from Brad over there. I don't think they are the cheapest, but I do believe you get what you pay for.