Is there really much advantage to having a server colocated close to you rather than somewhere not within reasonable driving distance?

I'm in the Toronto area...and even though the city has perhaps the best selection in Canada for colocation, there are far more choices in the U.S. and many have better prices. Being close to your servers when you have to look after the hardware obviously has its advantages. But for me the costs are generally higher.

Bottom line: what is the value in $/month that you'd put on having a colocated server nearby?

We are also located in Toronto and we colocate our servers in New York. It's a lot sheaper, better quality and it's only 2 hours driving distance.

If you are located close to your servers, geographically, then it is obviously much easier to access your servers, as you can simply drive / travel etc. to the datacenter.

If they are located further away, but the datacenter / host staff are competent, then you would rarely have a reason to access your server physically, when it can be controlled remotely.

Originally posted by Rehan
what is the value in $/month that you'd put on having a colocated server nearby? I would say, $500 one time fee? Because otherwise you can buy some remote management PCI board, which will allow to boot your server from floppy in your machine 1000 miles away, repartition the hard drive, reinstall the operating system... I.e. do everything except replacing hardware parts.

Those boards, like Compaq's Remote Insight, cost £390 here in UK, I am sure they are much cheapper in the US.

I think it's more important to host your server at a facility that has good connectivity, and is closer to your average customers.

We like catalog.com who has good network access and is located smack dab in the center of the US. Equal latency for our east and west coast customers.

And they're not just up the road for us, but we could have settled for one that was.

We always plan for the possibility of having to pay for someone else's hands to maintain our servers though.

bitserve,

I do like catalog.com.... I contacted them yesterday to ask if they offer colocation with client-supplied servers rather than the ones they sell and I was told that they don't. And the sales rep referred me to theplanet.com for a colocation solution. :(

I'm leaning towards local colocation. can-host.com is less than an hour away from me and seems to have very good connectivity at decent prices.

Not trying to put down a competitor, as id be more then happy to recommend you several of our competitors, but in the last week alone ive had 3 LARGE planet customers switch to us do to poor customer service.

You may have good service but you must either learn to type of check your spelling :)

/my typing speed sometimes out paces my thinking speed :) and i never take time to reread my posts (tis the life of a workaholic) but I will start.