Anybody know any reliable NOC's or resellers that have Canadian based servers?

Thnx.
Ben

http://www.digitallyjustified.com has a cage in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada I believe. Their representative is "VanHost" (Derek) here on WHT.

Off hand I belive 3.75-hosting.com is in Canada at Tera-Byte's data center.

You may want to take a few seconds and go to www.Netcraft.com Just type in various hosts you know/are considering into the search box.

On the results page click the "Netblock Owner" link. It tells you the data center and where it is. (This is how I always figure it out, but there might be an easier way I don't know of) :)

Hope this helps.

Actually, I heard of a new datacenter that opened a few years ago in toronto. Its supposed to be state of the art - downtown toronto...they converted a beer factory i think?

i was pointed to www.151frontstreet.com today they are in downtown toronto near the CN tower

I would check out www.prioritycolo.com, they are owned by porcupine of this forum, and is located at 151 front street in Toronto.

Myles, always seems to go far and beyond everyone's expectations, and truely has a top notch service.

Rackforce in Kelowna, B.C. We have our servers colo'ed in the same building. Great uptime

Other than priority colo, anyboyd else at 151 front?

Originally posted by pixelvibe
Other than priority colo, anyboyd else at 151 front?

What type of services are you looking for specifically? 151 Front is Canada's largest Carrier hotel. There are dozens of providers within 151 Front Street, and over 125 current Telco/Data carriers present in the facility, thus theres really no shortage of choices, as this building has the most diverse options in Canada at the present time.

As for the beer factory, theres a steam brewery a few blocks from 151 from what I recall (just by the lake) but I'm not aware of any real DC's downtown that are recently converted beer factories :).

Notably (for anyone reading) you should probably stop referring to www.151frontstreet.com as a location to get any type of data services (its a great reference of the building, dont get me wrong). 151 doesen't provide any sort of conditioned space, just core space (aka empty space where you can build a Data Center), nor do they provide any form of bandwidth, or colocation services (much less anything else like onsite staff, etc.).

I'm pretty sure the one I was thinking of was 151FrontStreet. Looks like an old factory on the outside doesn't it? I remember when it first went up, it was supposed to be a big deal, but then they started loosing money? Just what I read in the papers.

Porcupine, if you operate a datacenter onsite there, do you also have staff onsite 24/7?

Originally posted by pixelvibe
I'm pretty sure the one I was thinking of was 151FrontStreet. Looks like an old factory on the outside doesn't it? I remember when it first went up, it was supposed to be a big deal, but then they started loosing money? Just what I read in the papers.

Porcupine, if you operate a datacenter onsite there, do you also have staff onsite 24/7?

151 Front was a Bell Building waaay back in the 50's, so it's probably been telco since long before you were born (unless you're 50+).

We dont have 24x7 staffing, very few people do up here. Only two companies I'm aware of that have *true* 24x7 staffing are IBM, and Primus. Everyone else (that I'm aware of) only has part-time staff (even Switch and Data, Peer1, etc.). While I'd like to see it happen, totally different market up here, and unfortunatly I can't see that happening anytime soon (from us, or any of our major providers/competetors).

So what would be the advantages of locating the servers in Toronto? In terms of benefits for clients located in the NOC surrounding area (GTA)?

Do you have som examples of other colo's who use 151?

Even if you don't staff the NOC 24/7, what is your technical response time at any given time of the day?

Originally posted by pixelvibe
So what would be the advantages of locating the servers in Toronto? In terms of benefits for clients located in the NOC surrounding area (GTA)?

Do you have som examples of other colo's who use 151?

Even if you don't staff the NOC 24/7, what is your technical response time at any given time of the day?

Advantages are numerous. First off ping times, get anyone from any of the surrounding ISP's to ping a Toronto based IP (eg. for our network, you could use 66.199.180.22 as a sample). TorIX (the toronto internet exchange) provides a absurdly fast connection for anyone willing to participate, which happens to be most of the major ISP's in Ontario/Canada. Typically we see ping times of < 5 ms to the majority of local ISP's, with ping times of 5-25ms to customer home connections (depending on line quality, cable/dsl/dial, etc.). Download speeds are usually fast also (naturally).

Some other colo's in 151 would include:

www.neteasy.ca
www.peer1.net
www.switchanddata.com
www.neutraldata.com
www.canadian.net

etc. (theres been a few postings similar to this with more comprehensive listings)

Technical response time for us varries. During the day we have Switch and Data with numerous staff onsite, but I dont really like to use them personally (very expensive, and relatively ineffective most of the time). We use APC's (remote reboot) along with KVM over IP for the vast majority of our dedicated servers (over 90% of them), and serial console access to core devices, thus most issues can be resolved without anyone present. Depending on whose on call, and where they are at a given time; our access time to get downtown, parked, and up to the console typically varries between 15 and 45 minutes. Naturally this depends on the time of day, weather conditions, and a variety of other factors (usually its around 30 minutes, same as many NOC's have customers wait just to get an available competent tech :)).

In short, if you do business in the GTA, while its definatly more expensive due to the costs of doing business up here (after all, eventually all costs pass on), most of our customers find that for a variety of reasons, its worth the extra $$$ to host locally, even if its only a small percentage of their user base, as many customers enjoy the benefits, and signup for services based on them.

I would say www.peer1.net is the best of the NOC's in Canada

torix says its peering to shaw/rogers is conditional. what does that mean?

When you say faster response times, someone on BellNet business ADSL should get blazing speeds even though they aren't peering?

I don't really get the concept of peering though...

Originally posted by pixelvibe
torix says its peering to shaw/rogers is conditional. what does that mean?

When you say faster response times, someone on BellNet business ADSL should get blazing speeds even though they aren't peering?

I don't really get the concept of peering though...

It totally depends on the providers being used to determine speeds. All of the TorIX peers are conditional technically, but Rogers has a structured set of conditions before a company is permitted to peer. Rogers conditions are something like 3 months of 10mbps minimum traffic to Rogers users exclusively, justified by some form of stats, like netflow.

Peering is negotiated on a case by case basis with every ISP on TorIX (thus you cant just connect, and bang, be instantly peered with every ISP, you have to form a relationship with each. Notably you also need a BGP driven network, etc. to even start the process).

Peering is simply exchanging traffic between two networks end users (eg. our customers, and Rogers customers). This is preferable because its a direct connection (thus more control for the ISP's, no real third party to botch stuff, and obviously higher speeds).

Aside from that, Bell isn't on TorIX, so many wont get fast speeds to them. We specifically got a Teleglobe link as Teleglobe peers with Bell, thus that was our work-around to that problem (and now its simply 2 Toronto based networks to get to Bell, < 15ms from our side to theirs typically speaking).

First off ping times, get anyone from any of the surrounding ISP's to ping a Toronto based IP (eg. for our network, you could use 66.199.180.22 as a sample).

40 pings an average of 16ms thats pretty sweet. I'm on rogers in ottawa btw.

What I don't get is a lot of canadian hosters give you almost no storage space with an account. I local isp thats got a good rep charges $22.95 for the smallest plan and it includes 100 mb of storage. I mean hard drives are no more expensive here then in the states so why that big of a difference. I can understand bandwidth being much different.

Pinging 66.199.180.22 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 66.199.180.22: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=54
Reply from 66.199.180.22: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=54
Reply from 66.199.180.22: bytes=32 time=120ms TTL=54
Reply from 66.199.180.22: bytes=32 time=181ms TTL=54

Ping statistics for 66.199.180.22:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 20ms, Maximum = 181ms, Average = 87ms


GTA Rogers...87ms =(

Originally posted by pixelvibe
Pinging 66.199.180.22 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 66.199.180.22: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=54
Reply from 66.199.180.22: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=54
Reply from 66.199.180.22: bytes=32 time=120ms TTL=54
Reply from 66.199.180.22: bytes=32 time=181ms TTL=54

Ping statistics for 66.199.180.22:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 20ms, Maximum = 181ms, Average = 87ms


GTA Rogers...87ms =(

Whats your traceroute look like?

Just looking from our end to a random rogers user (found on Efnet heh):

traceroute to CPE000f3d437ddd-CM0011ae917054.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com (24.42.203.58), 64 hops max, 44 byte packets
1 18.180.199.66.prioritycolo.com (66.199.180.18) 0.769 ms 0.775 ms 0.682 ms
2 fe0-1-0.core1.prioritycolo.com (66.199.180.69) 0.695 ms 0.625 ms 0.558 ms
3 gw-rogers.torontointernetxchange.net (198.32.245.29) 0.872 ms 0.633 ms 0.617 ms
4 66.185.92.37 (66.185.92.37) 86.629 ms 176.122 ms 4.276 ms
5 gw02.ym.phub.net.cable.rogers.com (66.185.80.137) 14.421 ms 166.626 ms 4.572 ms
6 gw01.pr.phub.net.cable.rogers.com (66.185.81.177) 2.324 ms 1.867 ms 1.810 ms
7 gw01.ajax.phub.net.cable.rogers.com (66.185.81.173) 2.131 ms 2.159 ms 2.006 ms
8 gw01.mtmk.phub.net.cable.rogers.com (66.185.81.133) 3.304 ms 26.708 ms 3.495 ms


As you can see, less then 1.0 MS to the rogers network, what happens to it after it gets there is obviously Rogers deal, looks like a saturated router (hop 4) from this trace though.

See attached traceroute results

Originally posted by pixelvibe
See attached traceroute results

Yep, not too bad when you consider its 60-70 before it hits our network, and 40-60 once it does (aka only the latency you're already seeing from previous hops is being passed up). For best results (in any test like this) use a *nix based machine, as the results are far more accurate then the windows ones (Which round a good deal, and naturally perform slower, thus yielding slower results).