Why colocation sucks

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Let me tell you my little story.

I am a web developer since 1998, I mean I am developer for living since then because in general I am a programmer for many more years.

In 2001 I made my own small company called HumanWorks .

Well as a 'proffesional' I wanted to have a very good service for my clients, so I made a contract with a big company here in Greece for the web hosting. At the begining I haven't any serious traffic, plus I had only 5 or so clients, so my contract was to be hosted in the company's server with some privilleges that would make my life easier.

In the last year I decided that I should get my own server, and I made the decision to buy a server and colocate it to the datacenter of the big company that I allready mentioned. So I bought a very very very (.....) good server (dual zeon, 2Gb ram, 2 SATA HD, etc.) and colocate it with them. The reason that I puted to their datacenter and not to a big - cheap usa provider is that I though it would be better to host my sites from Greece.

Then the problems came out ..... The last two months the server has some failures and it seems that we get some Denial of service attacks. I believe this is because I made the aStatSpam program, and it seems that the spammers didn't like this movement. Ofcourse if my hosting company had a good firewalll this would not be a problem but they really suck, as they don't even have employees in the datacenter 24/7 !!!

So after a cost of several thousands euro, I decided to buy a dedicated server somewhere in the us, because at least there when I have a problem with the server, I will be able to reboot it....

My conclusion is that colocation is for those that want to have more servers than just one or two, and actually for those that do not need any technical assistance from their hosting company.

I've noticed these failures. It is very serious problem not to be online 24/7

Did that cost you in visitors - clients?

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Actually it costs in return visitors.

One of my main sites, http://www.topsites.gr/ is a portal like site, so I suppose that the visitors who come to the site every day to see the news, after visiting and get no page will not come back. I hope that I will be able to fix it

 I think I am going to have to disagree with you on this subject. I do agree if you colocate your server with a crappy provider, your going to have problems. But if you go with a quailty provider, you will not have many problems. And also when you use your own equiptment you are using hand picked parts that you picked yourself. Not some thrown together budget server. You can run any OS that you want, you can partitiion the hard drive anyway you want. And you can build the server anyway you want. In my case I ordered parts from newegg. I ordered a P4 3.0GHZ 2mb cache 64bit HT 1GB of ram 2x80GB SATA 150 hard drives 3ware SATA 150 raid card. Before I send the server to the data center I am going to add another 1GB of ram and a 250GB SATA 150 back up hard drive. I only use about 50GB of transfer per month. www.colo4dallas.com offers 100GB of traffic per month for $69.00. There is no way I am going to find a P4 3.0GHZ, 2GB of ram, 2x 80GB hard drives, hardware raid 1, and a 250GB back up hard drive for $69 per month.

 As far as server quipment break down, in 12 years of owning pc's and 3 years of owning servers I had one breakdown. And it was on my own personal pc. I was drunk comming back from a Lan party and banged the PC hard on a cement wall. And shocked the hard drive, it died a week latter. As long as you use quailty parts and not some cheap no name brand you are not going to have any problems. Last year my aunt bought some cheap ram for a local PC show. I told her not to use it, she didnt listen. 9 months latter she was getting memory errors and the pc was crashing like crazy. Dont get me wrong you still could have a break down, but your chances are slim to none if you use quailty parts.

 Another benifit of owning your own server is you own the equiptment. I bought a Dell Power Edge Server almost 3 years agao. I bought when they were running a special, I got it for $550. It was pretty skimpy but I added my own ram and my own hard drives. A year latter I swaped out the processor for a faster processor. I used this server for 2 and a half years. Two months agao I sold the server on Ebay for $475! So I got 2 and a half years of use out of the server and sold it for almost as much as I payed for it. When you rent a dedicated server you own nothing and when you leave the end of the contract. You leave with nothing. Now the down side. If you have a fast growing website. It could get very costly keeping up with equiptment upgrades.

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Propably you are right.

What I was meant to say is that when you colocate a server you must act cautiousness, as this could mean a lot of problems (like in my situation happened)

As for the rest part I don't think that when you colocate one server is cheaper than a dedicated one. You pay $69 with your own machine for 100GB of traffic, but you could pay $85 without paying the cost of the server and have 1000GB of traffic. Of course this also has to do with how much traffic you are using.

My latest thoughts is that you really need to know what is the company that you are about to host, and how they respond on several problems. Maybe forums like this are the best way to find out, because whatever a company promises, you must know how do they act when they face a problem

Propably you are right.

As for the rest part I don't think that when you colocate one server is cheaper than a dedicated one. You pay $69 with your own machine for 100GB of traffic, but you could pay $85 without paying the cost of the server and have 1000GB of traffic. Of course this also has to do with how much traffic you are using.

My latest thoughts is that you really need to know what is the company that you are about to host, and how they respond on several problems.

 I totaly agree with you. You can get 1,000GB of transfer for as cheap as $69, maybe even cheaper in some cases. But you have to look at what your getting as well. You are going to get a budget server with a Celeron or a Sempron with 512MB of ram and a 80GB hard drive. You can't even compare the profromance difference between a P4 3.0GHZ 2MB of Cache 64bit with hyper threading, 2GB of ram 2x 80GB Sata 150 hard drives, hardware raid 1 and a 250GB back up drive for the same $69. The P4 is going to smoke the budget server. If I really needed 1,000GB of transfer per month I could get it for $109 per month. Where can you find a P4 server with those specs for $109 per month?

 Knowing your future host has to be the biggest investment you make. You sure do not want to get stuck with a crappy host if you colocate or rent a dedicated server.

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Well you should check this out : http://www.layeredtech.com/layer1.php?g=13

As for the investment you may have in mind that the server that you buy, must be change in 3-5 years after you install it. So if you puyt that in the final price it can be more expensive than a dedicated.

Of course this is when you have one server, because if you have more colocation is one way

Well you should check this out : http://www.layeredtech.com/layer1.php?g=13

As for the investment you may have in mind that the server that you buy, must be change in 3-5 years after you install it. So if you puyt that in the final price it can be more expensive than a dedicated.

Of course this is when you have one server, because if you have more colocation is one way

Yes, it most certainly can be more expensive than some dedicated server options. But it can also mean more resources, better access and control over your hardware and so on.

I don't think colocation is ALL bad, it's just an option out there. You're the one who has to determine if it works for you or not.

15minuteservers.com has super cheap servers that are comparable with reseller packages but with 30 times the bandwith. 

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