*Lets just pretend here since I have always been ever so curious on this subject :D*

Now lets say out of some crazy reason a broke guy like me wanted to buy a facility and open up a hosting company. How much would you say this "CRAZY" idea would cost? I've always wondered how much a facility and OC connections would cost a company like burst. I'm probably gonna take a guess and say 6,000 for facility rent monthly, 10,000? for OC-192 connections? and 500 per server?


I am also doing a big project on companies and costs in my college. I would just like an input on how much a big company spends monthly with those three things included. Anybody have an idea?

Woah there. Your figures are way off.

Try this:

$6-10K per month for the facility, good sized
$1-5K per month in security
$100-200K for an OC192

so basically with employees and everything a good rounded off 250 K a month?....I'll just stick to normal hosting ;).

LOL. I believe so. Let's see if someone else has any ideas on relative figures.

WAAAAAAY above 20,000 <<== and then some!

Jay is on the right track...

Tack on a lot more for, electricity, maintenance contracts (for things like the UPS, Generators, fire suppression systems, etc..), redundant lines, local loops, plus a number of other things over and above hardware, humans, et al. Also remember that this "crazy idea" only asked about the monthly fees... so we'll ignore the startup costs :P Burst touts a facility quite a bit larger than ours, and the prices mentioned in the first post are far less than what we pay. There are many fees few would ever consider especially in the beginning to get the location approved for the type of power and fire equipment you want to install and maintain.

Of course prices vary dramatically depending on location and contents... slum vs corporate, Cogent vs. Internap, Wal-mart white boxes vs. enterprise grade servers, a water hose vs gas suppression etc etc etc

It's not cheap.

Why the heck would you start a new facility with an OC/192? At that level you're also looking at only limited places anywhere in the world capable of supporting your bandwidth needs, unless you reside in a city sitting on a major backbone be prepared to move.

-Matt

I believe OC192 is asked about because of the terminology used on Burst's site ("The Network Operations Center is connected via OC192 fiber connections... ") and he is using them for his example. For a start-up it's obviously overkill

That is correct. An OC-192 would be way too much pipe for a company just starting out. For instance, at XO Communications, they have an OC-192 fiber based network and redundant OC-12 lines coming into the Fremont data center.