The Scenario:

2000 sq foot "big square area" next door to the only local ISP I could trust. I can get the space for cheap, $1500 asking price, I said I wanted more like $800 they said "we can probably get close to that". No deposit.

The ISP will run an ETHERNET drop straight to me (there is 2 walls between us if I get it) and then I pay (current asking price without negotiation) is $499 per mbit (I'm sure I can get this price a bit lower but I'll be surprised if I can get this below $400). I can have this throttled up simply by walking across the hall and saying "hey, gimme 3 mbits, here's a check for the prorated month" and I have it.

2000 sq feet, that's a nice sized bit of colo space.

What else do I need? Racks, lots of them, just gonna make one big common area for now with freestanding non enclosed racks.

With that much room I could use white box rather than 1U servers for dedicated machines.

I was thinking Celeron/Duron 800+ 256M 20G and 20G of bandwidth for $79 per month and a $79 setup fee.

20G of bandwith for $50 per block of 20.

This is not Cogent or anything close to it either. Bellsouth/MCI/AT&T I believe are the 3 redundant T-3 suppliers. This ISP has been around since the start of the "commercial" internet (90/91 till now) so I'm as certain as I can be about any provider that they're gonna be there.

Thoughts are welcome.

Well, from what I last heard, you are doing pretty well with your company ;) Congrats.

If you can afford this, why not? The bandwidth looks good quality too. I don't know the specifics, but based upon what you said, it sounds safe. Good luck if you choose to persue this :agree:

Edit: Just a thought. If you grew rapidly, would you be able to expand at all? Or would you have to look at buying a new facility?

This is an old mall, expansion is typically not too hard since there's always someplace open for rent in there :)

Or at that stage you could probably just buy that shop out
:)

You could be like starbucks on The Simpsons, if you remember that episode :D

What city are you in ?

cause we are in downtown calgary and the rent is atleast 300% more then that rate.

that is a great deal.

Rent here is CHEEP.

I can get an 8X8 office in a nice little office complex by where my wife works for $100 per month.

I'm in Alabama :)

WOW right on.

If you can get good sqft in the hundreds a month then definetly do that.

Remember the less overhead the more money you have to spend and profit.

My only concern would be T-3's. May work fine for the current period, but ultimately come up short. Might ask if the host has plans of expanding.

Gary,

Take it!! That would be a nice place to co-locate ;)

But, since this will end up being a data center of sorts, you also have to concider security, backup power, etc...

I'd be all over that. That's not even half my mortgage payment!

-Dan

Originally posted by Dixiesys

I was thinking Celeron/Duron 800+ 256M 20G and 20G of bandwidth for $79 per month and a $79 setup fee.

20G of bandwith for $50 per block of 20.

This is not Cogent or anything close to it either. Bellsouth/MCI/AT&T I believe are the 3 redundant T-3 suppliers. This ISP has been around since the start of the "commercial" internet (90/91 till now) so I'm as certain as I can be about any provider that they're gonna be there.

Thoughts are welcome.


Sounds like a great plan... I would seriously consider it if I was you. But I would be a bit afraid of how many servers I could sell with only 20 gigs of BW a month at that price. I know you have RS servers as I do and like a lot of people here are getting accustomed to having 200-300 gigs bw/month for $99 or so/month. I wouldn't let that stop me but how many servers would you need to break even and get your money back from buying the servers in the first place?

Originally posted by Dixiesys
The Scenario:

2000 sq foot "big square area" next door to the only local ISP I could trust. I can get the space for cheap, $1500 asking price, I said I wanted more like $800 they said "we can probably get close to that". No deposit.

The ISP will run an ETHERNET drop straight to me (there is 2 walls between us if I get it) and then I pay (current asking price without negotiation) is $499 per mbit (I'm sure I can get this price a bit lower but I'll be surprised if I can get this below $400). I can have this throttled up simply by walking across the hall and saying "hey, gimme 3 mbits, here's a check for the prorated month" and I have it.

2000 sq feet, that's a nice sized bit of colo space.

What else do I need? Racks, lots of them, just gonna make one big common area for now with freestanding non enclosed racks.

With that much room I could use white box rather than 1U servers for dedicated machines.

I was thinking Celeron/Duron 800+ 256M 20G and 20G of bandwidth for $79 per month and a $79 setup fee.

20G of bandwith for $50 per block of 20.

This is not Cogent or anything close to it either. Bellsouth/MCI/AT&T I believe are the 3 redundant T-3 suppliers. This ISP has been around since the start of the "commercial" internet (90/91 till now) so I'm as certain as I can be about any provider that they're gonna be there.

Thoughts are welcome.

Some questions I'd be asking of myself and them:

How much is insurance going to be with ~$50,000 in equipment?

How much are backup power and power generators going to cost?

How smart is it to lock my business into one provider?

Are they willing to sign a lease for a specified time or will they bump the lease once you get going?

Wouldn't rackmount be more efficient use of space albeit at a higher initial cost?

How quickly and willing are they toorder more bandwidth should thier multiple T3's not suffice?
---

At any rate, good luck. I'm impressed with your service so far and I'd love to see what you can offer in regards to dedicated hosting.

Well my "conservative" side is gonna take this one.

#1 they've got 3 T-3's now if we're not even talking redundancy that's ~120Mbit of bandwidth, in 4 months time (as of Feb 24 it'll be 4 anyway) I've gone from 0-700 domains, and 0-430+ customers and I make a living doing this now and hired my first employee today. Currently if you add together the bandwidth all my servers use, it's over 2 mbits, steady, during peak (peak is all you care about, the fact that average bandwidth is about 1 mbit is unimportant). So if I keep trucking, in 4 more months, I'll be using over 1/10th of a T-3 by myself, this is assuming my growth is steady (my growth has been so far from steady since I started that it's nearly killed me). So if growth continues like it has, I'll be using over 6 mbits in 4 months, and who knows, 10? 12? in 8 months. I dont' think there are any trunks in Huntsville bigger than T3, I could be wrong, I'm far from an expert on that side of things.

#2, insurance, utilities, upgrades to the facilities are unknowns and likely EXPENSIVE unknowns. I'm sure the airconditioning system would need an upgrade, generators and stuff, yep, another concern.

#3, I'm making money now, why put myself in the position of "trying to break even" now? I might colo a few machines there if they come off the bandwidth price some ($499 per mbit is just steep, I'll go $350).

There's some offices across the street from my where my wife works, probably get one of those, $100 a month + utilities just to have a place to hang out when I get tired of the house :D

Originally posted by rastoma



Sounds like a great plan... I would seriously consider it if I was you. But I would be a bit afraid of how many servers I could sell with only 20 gigs of BW a month at that price. I know you have RS servers as I do and like a lot of people here are getting accustomed to having 200-300 gigs bw/month for $99 or so/month. I wouldn't let that stop me but how many servers would you need to break even and get your money back from buying the servers in the first place?

You're exactly right on that one, I looked at my bandwidth graphs and realized I'm using roughly 300GB on 4 servers, that's basically 1mbit sustained, not peak! My peaks look to be a HEAVY 2mbit, probably 2.2/2.3 mbit.

I think what I'll do is buy out my efreeserver, it's $199 a month and my most expensive server, and get the rest of my equipment at dv2.com and maybe even colo there, since I could drive to Atlanta...

Whatever you decide to do. Good luck. I love to hear companies such as youself do so well so quickly!! :)