[BBLISA] co-location

[Tabor J. Wells]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 10:08:18AM -0500,
Grant Young <grant at toaster-repair.com> is thought to have said:

> The one place I have experience with is Hosting.com in Boston.  It's
> part of Allegiance Telecomm.  They're probably not the cheapest but
> they've got space and network capacity to spare and their datacenter is
> top notch.
> 
> http://www.hosting.com/colocation_datacenters_boston.jsp
> 
> I used them in a former job and didn't have any problems.  They were
> cheaper than Verio and easier for me to get to.

I disagree with the assessment on hosting.com's DC. There are far better
DCs in Boston including InterNAP in Somerville, L3 in Cambridge, Switch &
Data in Waltham and Cable and Wireless (now Savvis) in Waltham. All of these
facilities are much better than the ALGX DC I toured a few weeks ago. 

In no particular order re: the reasons why my company decided not to go with 
ALGX
  
 * Their cooling seemed a little off with the space being a bit on the warm
side and much too humid. I can't imagine why they're trying to cool the
ridiculous amount of space between the tops of the racks and the ceiling
(which has to be at least 30 feet). The cooling also seemed uneven -- there
were several hot spots on my tour.

 * Their NOC staff is also their security staff. While I was with a sales
guy, I wasn't asked to sign in or show ID. Not that signing in/id flashing
has much in the way of security it just surprised me that they didn't even
ask for anything. While there were 2 people on duty in the NOC when I was
there I'm wondering which gets the attention when the NOC staff is dealing 
with a problem while someone is also coming into the DC.

 * Their DC is pretty empty. I would estimate maybe 30% full tops. I would
be concerned about how profitable it is for them.

 * Both ALGX and XO who they are merging with have their share of financial
difficulties in the last couple of years.

 * They seem to be losing customers to other DCs. Boston.com moved out of
there a while ago and yet ALGX still has them as a case study on their site.
I've heard reports of billing disputes with other customers over bandwidth 
utilization as well.

 * Last year their 'redundant OC12' connections to their Charlestown DC
were both taken offline when the single OC48 they were rolled up onto was
severed in a Big Dig fiber cut.

 * And finally http://www.harvardnetsucks.com/ Granted the stuff in here is
at least a year old but it gives you a sense of history about the company
that ALGX acquired.

All in all, they're probably better than the mom-and-pop/basement colo you
get with some small ISPs but I really wasn't impressed with ALGX when the
alternatives were much much better for relatively little incremental cost.

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Tabor J. Wells                                     twells at fsckit.net
Fsck It!                 Just another victim of the ambient morality