How often do you run into a company with 750,000 square feet to spare, naturally cooled, and ready to build out your data center? 85 feet below the surface? 65 feet below the water table?

Any one ever heard about these guys?

http://www.usdco.com/

Interesting. I wonder how the real estate market for old closed up salt-like mines is. This gives a whole new meaning to underground web sites!

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/24/1946257&mode=thread

Originally posted by DizixCom
. . . . . .Any one ever heard about these guys?. . . . .Heard of 'em? I just toured their facility two weeks ago. ;)
They're about twenty-five minutes away from me. :)

I was really impressed with their overall approach to the industry.
They are utilizing some old gypsum mines around here as a way to lower costs. They have no need for air-conditioning, although they do use fans. There is only one point of entry to secure. They seem to have all the tools to build a successful business.

I'm gonna have to drive up and check them guys out. I am near Detroit and have had a really hard time finding a decent colo facility locally. GR isn't that bad of a drive, I used to work out there a few years back -- drive up on Monday drive home Friday.

It sounds like they should be able to offer an excellent deal and their expenses should be extremely low relative to new construction, cooling, and all of that really fun stuff.

Did you get any indication on their pricing structure?

Originally posted by DizixCom
. . . . . . .
Did you get any indication on their pricing structure? No. But I have another meeting on Thursday. I'll update in this thread. :)

I think an update is in order here.

Nearly a month ago I went up to USDCO and met with SoftWareReview. I had two servers in tow and they were installed on the spot. Their facility is quite an experience, and though their pricing isn't exactly the best in the world they aren't overly expensive for what you get either.

So far I have had nothing but positive experiences. Their support has been great and fast, even at 11 PM on a Sunday. I emailed them expecting to wait until morning and not being overly concerned but before I could say "boo" they had responded.

Anyone looking for a decent Colo facility in Michigan, give em a call.

Have you had to have a server hard restarted by them? Where they hard to get ahold of? How long did it take them to travel down the mine and reboot the server manually? Thanks for your imput.

Nevermind, didn't read the entire thread.

Always excellent service so far.

I currently have four servers, a router, and a switch operating at USDCO.

My entire support history goes something like this:

First incident: When I installed additional RAM in a Dell PowerEdge 350 that I later took out there, I didn't seat the heat sink properly and the machine would shut itself off after intense use. The fine folks at USDCO pulled the server for me, ran the Dell diagnostics for 12 long hours, and finally after no errors could be detected they reseated everything and it's worked fine ever since. This was about a week after I installed the servers and the diagnosis began after 11 PM on a Sunday.

Second incident: Installing firewall support in the FreeBSD kernel. Sill me wound up locking myself out of the server. I sent in a request with instructions on rebooting to the old kernel and they didn't skip a beat, it was taken care of in less than 30 minutes.

Third incident: Being a masocist I replicated the steps in the Second incident and once again locked myself out of the machine. No complaints, they took care of it again and all is well. Again, less than 30 minutes and I was back in business.

Fourth incident: I did something that I still haven't figured out and one of my servers locked up while shutting down. I sent an email and waited, no response. I called, it was about 5 AM on a Monday morning and was directed to their call center. He took care of me, called me back promptly with updates, and everything went pretty good from there. In this instance I was down for slightly over an hour.

All in all they have been great. Bandwidth is Qwest and Uunet (I've yet to really see a UUnet route though) and I've had exactly 0 seconds of network related downtime that I am aware of.

A member here, haxorboi (now operating Detroit Networks), used to work for them and he handled incidents 1, 2, and 3, as well as helped me out in quite a few other areas. If you are looking for colo in Michigan I would recommend either of these two (USDCO or Detroit Networks) and I put my trust into both of them on a daily basis.

Wow. Nearly a year into it and still no problems?

That's impressive.

I have a box down there actually, but it's just for testing purposes for their bandwidth etc... I haven't tested their crashing, but I've had trouble getting ahold of them when I need to get new IP addresses for putting more servers in. And I suspect if it's hard to get ahold of them (even calling the data center guy's cell phone directly with no answer) it would be hard to get them to restart it in a timely manner.

1 hour of being down and waiting for them to restart the machine sounds like a VERY long time to me. I would say they need to work on this issue and move it down to 15-20 minutes TOPS.

whats the ip of your box down there macupdate?

sorry, but I feel uncomfortable giving out that information on a public board - especially for this private server.

Excerpt from the reply to an email I sent:


The first U of rack space is $100; each additional U is $80, not a straight $100 per U charge. We calculate our bandwidth pricing in two ways. The first is 10GB of data transfer per U, and the second is dedicating bandwidth on a per Mb basis. In the 10 GB per U case, any overage is charged at $3 per Gigabyte transferred above the allowance. Per Mb charges on a dedicated basis are $400/Mb for the first 5 and $350 for the next 5. Additional discounts prevail above 10Mb.