Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Colocation and Data Centers : Questions for future plans. Long...

[danny_gilbert]

Hello

Although I’m not new to the forum, I’ve wrote a little introduction to give you all a better idea of my plans. And to also help point me in the right direction.

First of all I have noticed that there seems to be a big thing on this forum where people judge someone’s ability by there age. Now I’ll be honest here, I’m currently 17; I’ll be 18 in January. For the past year or so I have been teaching myself as much as possible about the hosting industry by reading forums, reading e-books, looking at pictures of hosting dc’s / cages (its actually surprising what you can learn from just a few pics) and at the moment I’m currently teaching myself server management by having a box set up right by my side with Cent OS on it. I also have a VPS that I used to host my websites and also host sites for friends and family so that’s giving me a fair bit of cPanel & WHM experience.

I’ve been working with computers for a while now, I’ve networked houses and small offices (around 16 workstations, nothing major) I’ve nearly finished my CompTIA A+ and then I’m going to move onto the Cisco CCNA and then progress towards a CCIE.

I’m looking to start up a hosting business in the next couple of years in the UK offering Shared, Reseller & Dedicated (Maybe VPS after a while too) At the moment I’m currently planning various start-up scenarios to determine a budget needed and this is where I have come to a stand still and need some information on equipment needed.

I’m planning on collocating equipment in a half rack and then when needed upgrade to a full rack and then advance from there using full racks.

Now to the questions!
Q1) Is a 25Mbps unmetered pipe enough to host 8 servers on or is it overkill? I’m thinking more of the speed then the bandwidth. For bandwidth I’ve estimated I could probably get nearly 3-4TB per month realistic bandwidth, since a 25Mbps port can apparently push out 7910GB 24/7 (yea right) Am I being realistic by halving that?

Q2) What equipment would be needed to divide the 25Mbps into say 1x 23Mbps and 2x 1Mps, From what I have read I believe this is called rate limiting? Could be wrong.

Q3) How much should I expect to pay for a 25Mbps unmetered pipe? Probably be in either London or Manchester, would defiantly have to be in England though.

Q4) Something that I have always wondered, If I wanted to get my own IP’s direct from ARIN how are they actually assigned to a server? Is it just a simple case of entering it into the server configuration and that’s it or is there more to it?

I know this thread is really long but I don’t think it would be regarded as serious if I never gave the information I have so I do apologise if you have fallen asleep reading it.
If anyone has any information that they wish to add that may be of some help to me, feel free to add it.

Thanks
Danny

[leeware]

HI Danny,

I will answer your questions in turn.

Q1: Sure, obviously your use of this bandwidth will be determined by the types of sites hosted on the connection. If they are web-based / interactive sites 25Mbps should be just fine. However, if it is a mix of large file downloading / uploading + streaming media then perhaps not. Basically, it will vary based on the types of sites using the connection.

Q2: Basically, you need a switch that supports rate-limiting. However, you said that you plan on sharing this 25Mbps between eight severs. Where you would like to provision. your bandwidth so that you have 1x 23Mbps connection and 2 X 1Mbps. I assume that you are planning to connect two of the eight servers to the 1Mbps connection and the other six to the 23Mbps connection? Anyway, this can be accomplished using a switch that supports rate-limiting.

Q3: Research, Research, Research. The best way to determine the real costs for a project such as this, is try to pretend that you have all of the funds necessary to buy / pay for everything you need today. Then, look at what it would cost you to co-locate the said number of servers at a datacenter that offers the options that you want. Then separate the upfront costs. i.e. if you plan to buy / build the servers yourself from the monthly costs. i.e. how much it will cost you monthly for power +.bandwidth + rackspace + other options.

Q4: Getting IPs from ARIN is going to be more trouble than it's worth. Just get them from your ISP/Data Center they typically rent them to you in blocks as small as /27 up /24 When you get these blocks of IPs you will have some information about your default gateway, subnet masks and ip-range. You can use this information to allocate those resources to the severs you deploy.

Hope this helps.

Good Luck

[gavint]

Hi,

It's cool that you're interested in this stuff, and you certainly know a fair bit already.

Firstly, starting with a VPS is definitely a great start, and quite a few colo providers will do you space in a shared rack by the U, or a lockable quarter rack, rather than jumping straight in with a half rack.

1) As mentioned, this depends entirely on the servers. Many providers will allow you 100mbps burst on a Fast Ethernet connection, and bill you using 95th percentile - look that up and try to understand how it works. If you want <1TB a month to begin with, you can often buy an allowance in GB, as I imagine you do with your VPS.

2) You can either do this with a rate-limiting managed switch or a managed router. Some firewalls will also include this functionality.

3) Have a look around at colo provider's websites, for example www.ohtele.com.

4) The IP registry for Europe is RIPE, not ARIN, but again, unless you need at least a /22 you're best off getting them from the colocation or bandwidth provider.

Good luck! And write a business plan - it's for your benefit as well as the bank's.

[MrZillNet]

My suggestion would be to first, colocate a single, 1U server in the best facility you can find.

Look for the facility having good fiber connectivity, good UPS and generator, decent network in terms of reliability and speed.

Use mirrored (RAID1) hard disks to minimize the chance of data loss, and do regular backups.

Fill that server up with customers. At that point, you should have the server paid off quickly and will be able to decide where you want to go from there. I don't think you need a half rack and 25mbps to start.
A suggested system might be dual-Opteron, 4GB RAM, 2x300GB 7200rpm disks.