[BBLISA] Re: opinions about HE.net?

[Steven M Jones]

Jeff Ambrosino wrote:
> 
> We're looking to add some web server capacity on the west coast,
> and considering Hurricane Electric Internet (www.he.net).  Anyone
> here have any knowledge of this company, services, quality, etc?

I have assorted friends and aquaintances who have quarter and whole
racks at HE.net. I'd have a box there, but none of these worthies had
1U free to sublet to me when I was moving from Boston to Berkeley a
couple years ago.

The service is supposed to be good. I was attracted to them ~3 years
ago because they advertised that they supported IPv6 throughout, and
also offered a self-serve public IPv6 tunnel service. The only bad
thing I've heard is that, like many colo's, they've occasionally
had problems related to power density.

Since I was only placing a single box for personal projects, I found
HE's prices to be steep for either a quarter rack or a turnkey box --
especially since I already had a maxed out 1U ready to go. I wound up
at Layer42.net instead -- $60/mo gets me up to 2U for a box, and up to
256Kb of 95%-ile average bandwidth utilization. Bursting above that is
something like $125/Mb. At the time I got a 100Mb full-duplex Ethernet
drop, and now I suspect GigE is standard. There's a customer web
portal that shows your bandwidth utilization, IP address allocation,
DNS hosting status (they'll secondary w/ 4 servers), etc.

An extra $10/mo gets me a serial console connection, but the web
portal gives me a way to cycle power to the box -- crude, but
effective. Between the two I haven't needed staff intervention since
bringing the box live in Febuary 2005. I've only had one outage since
then where I was offline and it wasn't attributable to a software
problem or my own error, and it didn't last more than 2 hours as I
recall. YMMV.

You want a suggestion for a top tier colo out here? 365 Main in San
Francisco (www.365main.com). I got a tour from the siesmic measures in
the basement to the multiple diesels on the roof. The place is
absolutely incredible -- veritable operations-geek porn. If money
weren't an object, I'd get a cage there and sleep well at night. I
believe they also have another facility in El Segundo now. Makes my
experiences renting a rack, then a cage at Global Crossing in NYC
~2000 look like the joke it was.

HE.net is a very solid option, so far as I can tell. And, well,
obviously Layer42 meets my very humble needs at present. Small but
friendly, and they've just expanded their Santa Clara facilities.

I have no fiduciary connection to any of these services that hasn't
already been disclosed. Nor any friends working at any of them, so far
as I'm aware.

Good luck,
--Steve.