Micah's Advice, December 2006

Micah is a tech activist involved with many projects including Indymedia, Riseup and Seattle CCP. He has offered this advice for us to consider: The key things to consider, when we were searching for Colo in Seattle and when I was searching for colo in Chicago were primarily the following. There are a handful of others that I know of as well, but I need to look up the numbers:

• contract length or month to month?
• billing options (95th percentile? throughput?) (95th is mbps, throughput is GB/month)
• install costs
• commitments? is there a commitment to pay for a certain minimum amount of bandwidth?
• what is the cost to go over that commitment? (many places have this, we managed to negotiate out of this at our provider in seattle)
• how much power comes with the cabinet
• can you get a half cabinet?
• how is power billed?
• what is the cost for more power? what units does it come in? (do you have to get a whole circuit, or can you pay by additional amp, etc).
• does it cost extra to be on a backup generator or UPS?
• will you have 24/7 access to the facility — this one can get sticky because they dont like having 200 people on an access list, and if they provide access cards, those might cost/card
• how much will it cost to get access for more people?
• what is the depth of the cabinets available? (we have 40 inch, maybe 42 inch, something like that) it is nice to have a really deep cabinet like this, because then you can fit all servers. with short cabinets, it can be difficult and crowded and some servers won't fit)
• we found the large square holes to be the best for mounting. i think they are called 3/8, but that is probably not metric. better than the little round holes, because they are more flexible.
• where does your bandwidth come from? different providers have different reputations for quality (for example, cogent is often used as a backup network if a primary goes down, but usually never as primary because it has had some problems in the past. will you be locked into one provider or is the colo a bandwidth neutral exchange? what are their peering arrangements?
• if the colo is an independent bandwidth arbitrator will you be responsible for the cost of the cross-connect? If so, what will this be? Will you need to do the routing?
• do some research on the colo company — something that bit us in the ass in seattle one year was the provider we chose actually turned out to be harboring a lot of spam customers and their entire netblocks were tainted. this meant every few months our class-C was included in a /19 block by big spam blocking organizations like spamhaus and sorbs and the only way we could get out of it was to get the provider to clean house, not always an easy thing to do.