moved my server to internap houston data center
Posted on Nov 6, 2010 by
Paul WhiteAt the end of September 2010, my old Data Center had some lease issues, resulting in the data connection being pulled from the data center. So I moved my 1U rack server to
Internap. Many are wondering why I choose
Internap, hopefully this blog will provide some answers.
What is Internap?
Internap is a Datacenter located at 1301 Fannin Street, in Downtown Houston. They are an
SAS 70 Rated Datacenter. Everything about their setup is not just about redundancy, but also about performance. They do tend to be more expensive than most other data centers, but you definitely get what you pay for.
What is Internap's minimum Colocation Requirements?
Unfortunately if you are like me ( guy with a single 1U server ) you are not going to be able to deal directly with
Internap. Instead you will have to deal through one of their customers who own 1 or more 42U cabinets. In my case I found the guys from FastPCNet who own several cabinets at
Internap's Houston Data center. Their prices are not cheap. So if you are looking to get a server online for less, you could easily colocate with another data center for half the price. But if you have
websites and applications that you consider Mission Critical. As in if the server goes down, entire businesses can not function, then
Internap is the place for you. The rack space is expensive, and the bandwidth is also expensive. But they focus on quality beyound any other data center I have seen.
How is Internap's Data Center different from other Data Centers?
At the Houston Data center they have 6 data
providers. This means your server has access to 6 internet Backbones. If 1 goes down, there are still 5 others to handle the packets. Most decent data centers will have 2 data
providers. The packets are sent round robin through each data provider. This ensures the load is split equally. But
Internap doesn't have 6
providers as just a redundancy plan. They have it for performance as well. When a request is made to your server,
Internap will route the request through the fastest data provider of the 6. Since network speed is relational to your visitors geographic location, this means each visitor will get the fastest possible connection to your server. This is a huge plus for those
hosting websites with users all over the country or world. Normally if you are hosted in Houston, the ping time to New York could be 50 - 80 ms. I have clients in NYC and Canada that report much faster load times since the move to
Internap. My server hasn't had as much as a hiccup since the move.
How much does it cost to get Colocation in Internap?
It depends on which subcontractor you colocate with. I went with
FastPCNet. They are smaller outfit with a few cabinets at
Internap's Houston Datacenter. From what I understand they also have rackspace at some other
Internap Datacenters too. I am paying about $150 / month for rackspace, plus $50 / month for 1Mbit of monthly transfer. They only deal with whole Mbits of transfer. There are small price breaks on the transfer once you get to the 10Mbit mark. 1Mbit is about 320 GigaBytes for those of you in the
shared hosting world. Keep in mind data centers charge based on the 95 Percentile. They figure up your average transfer every 5 minutes. Your 30 highest hours are taken off, then your monthly average is calculated. I am also on a Gigabit Port. They guys at FastPCNet were great with the setup. They helped me get my rails setup and server in the rack. They also had my IPs and RDNS setup within a couple hours.
How is the Support at Internap?
Once again I am not a direct customer of
Internap. So I couldn't really answer this. But I am a customer of FastPCNet who is a customer of
Internap. Thus far support has been good. Granted the thought that I could drive down to the datacenter 24/7 and touch my server is nice, but in this case I don't have that kind of freedom. If I wanted to see or work on my server, I would have to contact FastPCNet and have one of their guys meet me down there. If it was during hours that they are not normally there, I would have to pay for their time which is also not cheap. The only reason I can see needing to go down to the data center would be to switch out a hard drive or power supply. Hopefully this only happens during normal
business hours.
Is Internap right for you?
If you have a small server that runs your gaming clan, then the price might be a little expensive. But if you are like me with 50+
websites running on the box, and dealing with outages could be an absolute disaster and not just an inconvenience, then yes
Internap is the right place for your server. Yes its expensive, but trust me you get what you pay for.
One of the things I like about
Internap is all the Cabinets match. Very clean design
Inside of our cabinet
My Server is the little White one. You can do a lot with a single 1U Rack Server.
UPDATE 1/28/2011I have been with FastPCNet at
Internap for a good 3 months now. The service and support is still awesome. In the past 3 months, the billing has been very fairly priced. I was just a little over on my 1Mbit of transfer and they didn't charge me for overages. Everytime I have needed to call them, I get one of their tech answering the phone. I even had to call on christmas morning when my server froze ( memory issues ), and their tech went down to and rebooted my box for me.
WhiteSites Blog
Looks cool btw what is the speed of the connection?