I am sick of paying a tech in Atlanta to show up onsite to do work my web hosting company’s server rack when I can do it myself if it was closer. I am now debating moving my two servers to a local data center.
Anyone know of a local provider who sells rack space?
why in the name of fuck are you posting this at 6am on new years day?
On call for work and got called so I am waiting for a process to run before I can go back to bed.
we have a data center in Amherst(dual entry fiber, multiple carriers, escorted/un escorted access)
Your other choices are http://shatterit.com/
or any company who is in 350 main…
Whats the problem that you need a tech to actually go on site?
No KVM over IP access? Switched rack PDUs?
Justin is the man for locality in Buffalo, but if you want to compare pricing send me an IM for colo.
Ha I got offered a job at shatterit when I graduated at the downtown office. Turned it down and ended up getting a friend a job there tho before he moved.
Basically I am working on offering more services than shared hosting that will rely on dedicated servers so looking to find the best way to hook it up to limit the need for someone to go onsite and image, troubleshoot, built, etc. There has been some issues the last few days where a power supply died in one of my servers and a customer screwed up their OS install.
I don’t know if PCI could fulfill your needs.
Personal Computers Inc
I lease my servers but are fully unmanaged by the host. I pay my own tech to go in and work on them when I need something. My new idea is to look at pricing to buy my own local high end server and virtualize everything on it. I currently have a P4 running as a remote database backup server and then a Dual Xeon that I use for my shared hosting/reseller accounts.
In the next few months, I am looking to expand into dedicated hosting (managed/unmanaged) amd also hosted PBX/VoIP solutions.
boxxa if you go virtual let me know…I can lend some advice…
shatterit :tif: they only have fiber entry one way they are not on a fiber loop
Are you going to offer VoIP to customers who use timewarner business class cable?
For virtual, I figure it might help better suit my resources since I would only need one server and be able to backup, restore, image, etc with the virtual machines instead of 2 physical servers and better expand that way. I have typically been hosting for friends and doing small side work but in talking to some people recently, I have seriously considered expanding the site and opening up to public hosting.
Just been looking into hosting a virtual PBX for some people to help them with their phone lines. I have looked into doing it for my house in rochester and looking at way to expand it for residential customers by selling hardware and service.
SIP trunks are pretty cheap 
Virtual is the way to go…
You may want to consider just renting VMs from someone over actually buying hardware and having to worry about life cycle…that way you can easily add on more ram and harddrive space on the fly as you grow.
It is if you have the money to buy the proper hardware. Virtualization can be pretty hard on your disks, so if you do build a machine for that purpose, make sure you raid together some fast disks…
Boxxa, out of curiosity, what is the URL of your hosting co?
:lol:
Obviously you keep your VMs on a raid 5 with SAS drives or something similar…
Most of the virtualization deployments I have setup use a SAN for VM storage…
Yeah, I agree completely, but buying a SAN quickly makes virtualization a lot more expensive.
You could build something for cheap using open source software (such as openfiler), but you’d still need the fast disks/raid there anyway.
You could also use the free version of Xensource…
You really just need to understand what your moving over to virtual…Disk I/O, Ram usage, CPU usage…if you’re building on a budget…
Anyways did you figure out a game plan?
btw if you run Asterisk on virtual machines you may need to change up some kernel source…
Site is in the process of being built and going above the hosting for people I know. Pretty much all the customers on there are custom packages that I built for their needs or leased dedicated servers that do specific applications. Making more standard packages and online billing this year.
Ya I have heard Asterisk doesn’t play nice with virtual servers without some heavy tweaking. We are looking into a couple of different paid license products too since we have whole sale pricing on VoIP hardware.
Your site looks pretty nice but you need to raise those prices if you ever want to make money 
I’ve been in the hosting game for almost four years now so if you need help with anything, let me know.
PCI downtown Buffalo can do virtual servers. I’m not sure on pricing, but they have two data centers.
I used to work there; great group of knowledgeable people!
Ha well most of the people I host are really independent customers who interact with me very little. I started it with a server and hosting people to pretty much pay for my server so I can play with my own accounts. Now that I am getting more and more people asking I am trying to standardize it. Not trying to make money on shared hosting so I rather drive customers to me with cheap prices and then make money on virtual pbx, VPS, and managed dedicated servers is the new goal.
I got my SIP trunks ready to go, just gotta figure out where to point them.
Ok I will look into them. DO they allow co-lo too?