Re: Please tell them TMC sent you
TMC said:
Out of curiosity, why do you require a dedicated server in the City Of Angels or Shaky Town specifically?
The name of Los Angeles is
not "City of the Angels"; it's
La Puebla de nuestra senora, reina de Los Angeles, or in English, "The City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angeles". Perhaps less poetic townspeople might have names it "St. Mary's"
.
As you should already know, not every hosting co with offices in the Golden State actually locates their boxes in the Golden State.
Some people rent servers based on proximity to themselves; others based on proximity to high-speed connectivity to their top markets. Others perhaps based on proximity to good 24/7 management staff.
We rent at the Level3 datacenter in Tustin, California, for several reasons.
You call it "shaky town" but the fact is that three of the hemisphere's most destructive earthquake in recorded history cut a wide swath of throughout the midwest, and were centered near New Madrid, Missouri; they were of approximately 8 magnitude on the Richter Scale. They rang church bells as far away as Boston, and if they occurred today they would cause untold deaths and devastation to the tune of billions of dollars (see
here).
The Level3 data center we use is a few miles due east of Santa Ana on the earthquake map
here.
As you can see, though I live close to the San Andreas Fault, the data center is in a very stable area of Southern California. The cabinets are well bolted to data center structural floor supports, the servers are securely bolted inside the cabinets, and the cabinets are securely locked.
Wire leaves the building in several directions, and redundant power is supplied by local redundant generators with local redundant fuel sources.
You can't get into the data center through social engineering; you must have (a) an identification card, and (b) a hand that matches the data linked to the identification card.
As far as connectivity is concerned, Level3
is the Internet; they're a Tier-1 provider and own their own wire and much of what we call the public Internet as well. Look at their map
here; the Level3 data center is a "best" place to be for hosting connectivity anywhere from the Orient, from Australia, through the population centers of the US, and all the way to Europe. Multiple root-servers and gtld servers appear to be on Level3 connections.
For example the cheapest server farm we currently endorse is
http://www.globaldc.com (individual dedi svrs with or without DA, with or without dual WAN connectivity, commendable uptime, and 24/7 phone support from $19/month with free setup).
I don't know anything about them except what I find on the website you point to, but I guess I can ask if you wonder why anyone would locate in "shaky town", I'd have to wonder why anyone would would locate with a company that...
Offers a choice of Operating Systems that are either beyond EOL (RHL 9) or supplied by an open source project that recommends against using them for production servers (Fedora).
Offers only 3 MB connections (about the same speed as the DSL line servicing my home).
Apparently their boxes are in VA yet their offices are in WI
and are located approximately 1,000 miles away from their servers (yes, a short drive in case of emergency).
Or in short, why would you recommend servers in Virginia and a company in Wisconsin, to someone who wanted a server in Los Angeles?
The request sounded fairly location specific to me.
Jeff
