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  1. #1

    Question Los Angeles Colocation and also Rack Servers

    Hi, new here but love this forum already. I'm looking for good colocation hosts in the Los Angeles area. Our current setup is a saturated point-to-point T1, with an average transfer of 390ish gigs per month (12-13gigs per day). The servers are 3 towers which I would like to convert to rackmount servers. The main web server serves around 40 million hits/month (cgi/db pages), and 80 million or so ads. The other two servers are supportive servers providing in house mail, dns, filtering, ssl.

    I expect that once the bottleneck of the T1 is removed, bandwidth will quickly double, possibly triple within a few months. How much of a commit should I be shooting for, for the first 3-4 months? And what type, 95th percentile or unmetered dedicated X mbits? Of course I would like a good price, but I would like to colo with a very good provider with a good network with cross connects. Reaching quality support (as in competent network techs) if/when we ever need anything or have a problem is really important for us. If we get good personal quality service and matched bandwidth quality, we'd very likely be loyal clients for years until we outgrew the provider. Who should I be looking at in the Los Angeles area? All suggestions would be appreciated. I'm open to hosts soliciting me in PM, but the member feedback will make the biggest impression.

    As for servers, what vendors/systems/configurations do y'all recommend? There is really only 1 main server, and the site is hard drive intensive, so I'm leaning towards a 15k RPM SCSI raid. I'm very interested to learn how much load an upper end server (dual Xeon, 3 gigs ram) can handle, but I won't complicate this post any further by posing too many questions, and let the ISP issue get prevelance. Any tips/links/advice on servers to head me in the right direction would be appreciated though.

    Thanks.. Really glad I found this forum.

  2. #2
    Join Date
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    NRsoftware would give you what you need.
    http://Ethr.net jay@ethr.net
    West Coast AT&T / Level3 / Savvis Bandwidth, Colocation, Dedicated Server, Managed IP Service, Hardware Load Balancing Service, Transport Service, 365 Main St, SFO / 200 Paul Ave, SFO / PAIX, PAO / Market Post Tower, 55 S. Market, SJC / 11 Great Oaks, Equinix, SJC

  3. #3
    Join Date
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    Re: Los Angeles Colocation and also Rack Servers

    Originally posted by Melian
    Hi, new here but love this forum already.
    This topic has been covered a lot. If you hit the search button up top, then type in "Los Angeles Colo", you will get tons of threads about this that should help answer your questions.

    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/search...t&sortorder=de
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  4. #4
    Mfjp,

    Thanks..I'll be calling them Monday.

    hosting&colo,

    Erm, I didn't know that.. I'll email you directly, as I don't want my email address to be listed publically.

    UmBillyCord,

    I have seen some of the past posts, but very few had the parameters I'm specifically looking for. Also, I was hoping that others can give advice on the other questions I asked, such as what type of billing is better given the circumstances, and how beefy of a server should I get? From the past posts, I still couldn't glean who has the best price/support/bandwidth quality out here, and was hoping for further enlightenment. Sorry if this seemed redundant.

    All advice is very appreciated.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Sheboygan, WI
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    Re: Los Angeles Colocation and also Rack Servers

    Originally posted by Melian
    Hi, new here but love this forum already. I'm looking for good colocation hosts in the Los Angeles area. Our current setup is a saturated point-to-point T1, with an average transfer of 390ish gigs per month (12-13gigs per day). The servers are 3 towers which I would like to convert to rackmount servers. The main web server serves around 40 million hits/month (cgi/db pages), and 80 million or so ads. The other two servers are supportive servers providing in house mail, dns, filtering, ssl.

    I expect that once the bottleneck of the T1 is removed, bandwidth will quickly double, possibly triple within a few months. How much of a commit should I be shooting for, for the first 3-4 months? And what type, 95th percentile or unmetered dedicated X mbits? Of course I would like a good price, but I would like to colo with a very good provider with a good network with cross connects. Reaching quality support (as in competent network techs) if/when we ever need anything or have a problem is really important for us. If we get good personal quality service and matched bandwidth quality, we'd very likely be loyal clients for years until we outgrew the provider. Who should I be looking at in the Los Angeles area? All suggestions would be appreciated. I'm open to hosts soliciting me in PM, but the member feedback will make the biggest impression.

    As for servers, what vendors/systems/configurations do y'all recommend? There is really only 1 main server, and the site is hard drive intensive, so I'm leaning towards a 15k RPM SCSI raid. I'm very interested to learn how much load an upper end server (dual Xeon, 3 gigs ram) can handle, but I won't complicate this post any further by posing too many questions, and let the ISP issue get prevelance. Any tips/links/advice on servers to head me in the right direction would be appreciated though.

    Thanks.. Really glad I found this forum.
    Melian,

    Welcome to the WHT Forums.

    First off, as for your bandwidth concerns, If you're not quite sure what kind of jump in traffic you will get after getting off of your current T1, that you go for an un-metered capped solution. 5 - 10mbs. Unless you have a clear idea, and willing to pay a bit in overage charges incase you are wrong, in which case a solution for burstable to 100mbs may work out well for you. Many hosts will work with you in these regards. If you specially request to be monitored, and say, pay for only 1000gb of transfer for the first month or two, and then notice that you are exceeding that limit, you can adjust with the host accordingly for decent rates. If i were you, i would attempt to steer clear of 95th percentile billing, as popular websites that you described as having, have tendancies to spike in traffic from month to month, and you may end up paying more in the long run for those spikes.

    As for server hardware, you pinged right on the raid solution. I've found that HD intensive sites perform MUCH better in a SCSI raid environment. I would suggest rack mounts etc, or interpromicro for 1U - 2U servers. Also, don't skimp on the RAM/CPU if its database intensive

    As for providers in the LA area, i really don't have any suggestions right now, wish i did. I can track a few down for you and eliminate some bad apples fairly easily from the list if you want the help. I'm bored.

    Can't stress enough about the 95th percent billing though. I've been burned before. That is a good billing model for < 600GB transfer/mo, but anything more, and combined with possible spikes, it can hurt!

    Also, keep in mind that top notch hardware is good, but if you plan on utilizing the hardware to its full potential, a finely tuned OS definately helps alot to ensure your hardware is performing at a level that it should be. I've seen people throw redhat out of the box on a dual Xeon, 3GB RAM, SCSI HD's, and expect it to sing like a canarie, only to be disapointed in its performance because they did not do a little research into the OS, and make a few customizations.

    Thats pretty much my $0.02, good luck!

  6. #6
    kic,

    Thanks so much for your reply.. I've narrowed my search down to NRSoftware and Alchemy.net .. Couldn't find anything on Alchemy on these forums though, anyone have any thoughts on them at all? If there are any others anyone thinks I should look at, please let me know.. I'm having a hard time finding a high quality bandwidth, bgp, load balanced, unmetered solution. I may not even opt for unmetered depending on the price, but I really like having the option for down the road if ever the need arises.

    For now we've decided to toss in our tower servers and get the rack servers when we can fully research them, as the colocating *now* is a priority at this point. I'm sure you'll see me around here again when that comes up.

    So, still hunting for the best colo fit for us. Any more help would be sweet

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Sheboygan, WI
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    183
    Originally posted by Melian
    kic,

    Thanks so much for your reply.. I've narrowed my search down to NRSoftware and Alchemy.net .. Couldn't find anything on Alchemy on these forums though, anyone have any thoughts on them at all? If there are any others anyone thinks I should look at, please let me know.. I'm having a hard time finding a high quality bandwidth, bgp, load balanced, unmetered solution. I may not even opt for unmetered depending on the price, but I really like having the option for down the road if ever the need arises.

    For now we've decided to toss in our tower servers and get the rack servers when we can fully research them, as the colocating *now* is a priority at this point. I'm sure you'll see me around here again when that comes up.

    So, still hunting for the best colo fit for us. Any more help would be sweet
    NRSoftware looks a bit more stable, as far as from a company growth standpoint, however Alchemy looks to have been around a bit longer. ('96 vs '00). Both seem to have gone through the proper avenues of registering a licensed business, and i don't think either would be a problem for you relating to new fly by night startups. I don't have any actual experience with either one of them as a customer, so i can't really comment on that, and my contacts have not expressed an experience with them either. I would perhaps check with either one, and see if either of them will allow you to do a 3 month commit, in order to test their services.

    Hope that helps a little.

  8. #8

    Cyberverse Inc.

    I've been a very happy customer of Cyberverse Inc. since the mid-1990s. They are similar to Alchemy, and have just opened a new colo facility in downtown LA.

    The main reason I like them so much is that where other ISPs have quickly succumbed to too-rapid growth and burned out in a blaze of greedily exceeding their capacity, Cyberverse resisted doing that, even during the bubble when it would have been easy to do so. As near as I can tell, the only reason they didn't go down that path like everybody else is that their owner/founder, Greg Domeno, is actually an ethical businessman who believes it would be wrong to charge people for services he isn't able to reliably deliver.

    I've hosted all my own web stuff with Cyberverse for 10 years, and have directed all my consulting clients to put their stuff there as well. So far, all of them who have followed that advice have been happy with Cyberverse's service. Like any ISP, they occasionally experience outages. Unlike too many other providers I've had experience with, though, they don't just blow smoke at you when you try to find out what's going on. Instead, they give you honest answers. More importantly, they have some really outstanding people on their staff who can troubleshoot and solve problems quickly.

    Their number is 877-992-9237. Good luck!

  9. #9
    Join Date
    May 2001
    Location
    California
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    801
    Alchemy got all of their IPs listed on SPEWS and well known for housing some major spammers. Eventhough they have a nice facility, but their bandwidth is pretty useless. Everytime they got a new IP, SPEWS quickly put them on their list, so if you want to use their facility .. its best if you get your bandwidth from other provider.
    Roy K.
    Pixie Internet Services - http://www.pixiehost.com
    Affordable, reliable hosting solution with Instant Activation

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Aug 2002
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    Santa Monica
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    Originally posted by kic
    NRSoftware looks a bit more stable, as far as from a company growth standpoint, however Alchemy looks to have been around a bit longer. ('96 vs '00). Both seem to have gone through the proper avenues of registering a licensed business, and i don't think either would be a problem for you relating to new fly by night startups. I don't have any actual experience with either one of them as a customer, so i can't really comment on that, and my contacts have not expressed an experience with them either. I would perhaps check with either one, and see if either of them will allow you to do a 3 month commit, in order to test their services.

    Hope that helps a little.
    Not that it really matters, but just as a point of clarification, NR Software Systems has been in business since 1984. I think it has been brought up before, but the registration date of a domain name isn't always the best method to date a company. In any case, the company did undergo an ownership change in 2000 and since we have been focusing more on the managed services and data center operations side of the market.

    On a seperate note, Alchemy has a nice datacenter with a good tech staff and their bandwidth is nice as well (if I remember it used to be UUNET/GLBX/L3 and I think they dropped UUNET for Wiltel now). Either way, I think they are a great company that definitely knows what they are doing so you can't go wrong there.

    Not sure about Cyberverse (haven't heard anything about them). Where are they located?

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Mar 2002
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    14
    I would also take a look at tophost. The engineers behind this company are the same who helped start great companies like Concentric. The pricing is reasonable but there's virtually no limitations to what their admins will do. At this point another quote can't hurt :-)

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Location
    Las Vegas, NV
    Posts
    2
    Re: the ISP, you may also want to try broadspire.com in downtown LA. Re: the server, what OS do you use? Linux, Win? and what database platform? A dual xeon running Linux, with 3-4GB RAM, SCSI drives should work wonders.

  13. #13
    Cyberverse is at 600 W. 7th Street in downtown LA. They have a new datacenter there. Previously they were located in Torrance.

  14. #14
    Oh WOW, Cyberverse is still around?? If it's the same company, and I'm suspecting it is, I know them from waay back when. They had a really cool BBS setup where it was basically a MUD world. I used to chat with the owner there occasionally. My companys' first incarnation was as a BBS too. I'm glad to see they're still around and survived.

    I'd rather prefer to go with a larger colo provider though, whose main business isn't hosting accounts.. I've found that the level of support you get from them is different.. ie: if one of their mail servers has a problem, they may get hundreds of calls from their budget clients, and your urgent problem with a connection may get less, or very delayed, attention..unless the company is big enough to direct the issues to multiple people 24/7.

    I'm still deciding between NR Software and Alchemy. I'm leaning towards NR, but Alchemy isn't making it easy on me, by price cutting and trying hard to match NR's prices. I'm waiting on final quotes now, and I should have a decision within the next day or two.

    Juliep,

    We're a Linux only shop..couldn't imagine running servers on any Windows platform, I don't think we would have survived if we did. Currently we're using Redhat, but we've considered checking out debian, and we compile our own kernal. The database we're using now is Berkeley DB, but we want to switch to an RDBMS, either Prostgres or MySQL, whichever is faster (any comments on this?). Our application is written primarily in C. The whole design of our system was to squeeze out every last drop of efficiency out of minimal hardware, and it has worked quite well up until now. Going forward though, we'd like the increased functionality of an RDBMS, and will trade off some hardware efficiency. Our current setup will absolutely *scream* on a dual xeon with 3 gigs ram, but I have no way of guaging the increased overhead of a relational database, which as I've been told, is quite a bit more.

    I would *love* any advice on this!

    Thanks all!

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Apr 2004
    Location
    Los Angeles, CA
    Posts
    17
    Alchemy has been around for a while and definitely a high end provider. I have however, heard multiple horror stories from current and previous Alchemy customers, as well as other tenants of the building they are in (1200 7th) about bad business practices.

    I would steer clear of Alchemy and go NR Software at any cost.
    NR Software maintains credibility, multiple locations throughout the greater Los Angeles area and their own network, unlike Alchemy. Also you have access to better carriers such as Savvis (formerly CW).

    My vote is NR Software ...
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  16. #16
    Join Date
    Jul 2002
    Posts
    452
    I have servers with NRsoftware and am very happy. Uptime is awesome and the staff actually care .... or at least pretend to very well Lol.

  17. #17
    Well to answer you question about MySQL and Postgresql...

    MySQL is hands down the faster on Selects and Inserts. It also has a good liscense ( now ) if you code in PHP. It can even scale, as Cox Communications has their datacenter running off of it. However; when you talking about the better DB of the two I would without hesitation recomend Postgresql. It is basically a free Oracle with the self maintenance of DB2. It is resource heavy and likes ram. MySQL cannot hold a candle to it in features. It also has a BSD-like liscense.

    If you need stored procedures, C,TK,perl, java, ASP.NET language connectivity, native transactions and the like... and it seems you do since you code in C... then postgresql is your DB if you don't want to pay liscensing fees.

    Caution... Postgresql isn't you friendly neighborhood Mysql... it does demand a good tech to setup and a good dba to understand its quarkiness.

    Cheers

  18. #18
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Posts
    192
    I'd stay away from Alchemy. Their upper management isn't the brightest and their techs are severely overworked.

  19. #19
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Posts
    192
    Originally posted by hooflung
    Well to answer you question about MySQL and Postgresql...

    MySQL is hands down the faster on Selects and Inserts. It also has a good liscense ( now ) if you code in PHP. It can even scale, as Cox Communications has their datacenter running off of it. However; when you talking about the better DB of the two I would without hesitation recomend Postgresql. It is basically a free Oracle with the self maintenance of DB2. It is resource heavy and likes ram. MySQL cannot hold a candle to it in features. It also has a BSD-like liscense.

    Caution... Postgresql isn't you friendly neighborhood Mysql... it does demand a good tech to setup and a good dba to understand its quarkiness.
    PostgreSQL is just as easy to administer as MySQL. Like any database, it just depends on what you need from it. The performance gap between MySQL and Postgres has been pretty much elimited in recent releases.

  20. #20
    Just to update.. We did decide to go with NR Software.. I just felt very comfortable with their setup, attitude, and Nishant won me over..

    I am already extremely confident that I made the right decision..Our install turned out to be a difficult one.. It just dragged on and on..Nishant was there throughout the whole thing, beyond the call of duty. He didn't ever complain or make the situation any more stressful than it already was, which was really quite a relief because I can easily picture many who would have. Thanks again Nishant.

    We are all installed now and quite happy..

    Now, onto buying the rack servers.. but I think I'll just join in on the existing threads for that.

    As for Postgres vs MySQL, I seem to get such conflicting opinions everywhere.. Are the two really on par with eachother and it really depends on your implementation? I've been told by several people that both can do what I need, but it has to be designed correctly to perform that well. Is this pretty much consensus?

    Thanks everyone who commented with their .02

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