Web Hosting Blog :: Ubiquity Hosting Solutions

Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to rent the server or servers that you need to operate your IT infrastructure.  When this is the case, what customers frequently need is called “colocation” or “collocation.”  Colocation is essentially the concept of renting datacenter resources and providing your own hardware.  The typical colocation project involves renting space, power, and bandwidth.  While sometimes other things are necessary (private circuits, ramped services, etc.) we’ll just cover a basic colocation experience in the interest of answering the great majority of questions about the process.

Step 1: Purchasing

The first step is to contact our sales department and let us know what you need.  We’ll send you an official quote.  If the quote looks good, we’ll go ahead and begin the process.  If the quote doesn’t look good to you, let us know what we need to tweak to meet your needs and we’ll provide another quote.

Step 2: Setting up Invoicing

The next step is to set up billing for the service.  We’ll take down your contact information, generate an invoice in our billing center, and provide login information so you can sign on and pay it.  If your colocation involved a contract longer than month to month or was over $500/month, we’ll also typically have a written, signed contract by both parties – don’t worry, it’s a very painless process.  We generally skip this formality on very low dollar colocation arrangements and month-to-month colocation arrangements, but if you’d like the MSA (Master Service Agreement) on a smaller colocation agreement, we’re more than happy to sign one.  Once the invoice is paid, the lead time for the service begins.  Leads times are typically brought up in step 1, but can range from 3 to 30 days on most projects depending on size and complexity.

Step 3: Equipment setup

Once your invoice is paid, Ubiquity will contact you with IPs and other provisioning information.  If you’re going to ship your server(s) to us, just let us know the tracking number(s) as soon as it’s available.  If you’re going to bring your equipment in in person, contact us letting us know what time you’d like to bring it by. Once you’ve brought in your server(s), we start the billing cycle from that day.

If you have any questions, please let us know!

As your site grows, your hardware might need to as well.  In fact, with any sizable growth, upgrading the hardware that is dishing out content to your users is inevitable.  Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at some general strategy in upgrading hardware so you get the best bang for your buck.  After all, not in your interest or our interest to waste time, money, and resources on upgrades that don’t make sense.  If this is your first Linux Dedicated Server, you might want to check out last week’s post about renting your first dedicated server.

Choosing and upgrading a bandwidth plan

By default, our plans come with 6TB of data transfer on a  100mbit port.  There are a whole host of changes you can make to this plan.  You can upgrade the port speed ($35/month).  This essentially allows you to do a lot more bursting, but doesn’t let you move more traffic over the course of the month.  In other worse, it lets you “spend” your traffic allotment faster, but doesn’t make it bigger.

Our 12 TB plan is a $70 upgrade, but allows you twice the bandwidth.  It lets you transfer more bits and bytes over the course of the month.

Alternatively, you can get a dedicated port.  The nice thing about dedicated ports is that you cannot get an overage.  In other words, if you have a 6TB plan (6000GB) and you use 6001GB, you’ll be responsible for a $1 overage.  It doesn’t sound like much, but it can add up fast.  To ensure you don’t have overage bills, get a dedicated port.  This is frequently called “dedicated unmetered.”  It’s essentially saying that you can use the full 10 mbps, 100mbps, or 1000mbps (or custom port size) without any chance of overage.  Changing the port speed greatly changes the price.

If you have any questions, let us know at sales (at) ubiquityhosting (dot) com!

As your site grows, your hardware might need to as well.  In fact, with any sizable growth, upgrading the hardware that is dishing out content to your users is inevitable.  Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at some general strategy in upgrading hardware so you get the best bang for your buck.  After all, not in your interest or our interest to waste time, money, and resources on upgrades that don’t make sense.  If this is your first Linux Dedicated Server, you might want to check out last week’s post about renting your first dedicated server.

Picking out and upgrading your HDD configuration

Since hard drive (often shorted to HDD for Hard Disk Drive) size is pretty straight forward, we’ll simply cover the other upgrades that are possible.  Any of the upgrades below are possible in varying sizes, although the that variation itself may be limited.

RAID – There are three main types of RAID used in Web Servers.  There are a few options beyond these, but here are the best options for web hosting, particularly when you factor in cost.

1. RAID0 – In this RAID array, every other bit is written to a different disk, thus increasing speed by the number of disks in the array.  If anyone one disk fails, all of your data is lost.  Most people do not put any more than two disks in a RAID0 array because the more disks you have, the more likely it is to fail.  With two drives, you’ll have approximately the combined total storage space of both drives.
2. RAID1 – In this RAID array, the disks are mirrored in realtime.  It is only done with two disks.  With two drives, you’ll only have the total storage space of the smaller drive.
3. RAID10 – This has the benefits of the speed of RAID0 and the redundancy of RAID1.  Actually, it’s implemented (more or less) as a RAID array of RAID arrays.  With four drives, you’ll have the storage space of 2x the smallest drive.

HDD Speed – Most Ubiquity servers come with 7200RPM drives.  These can be upgraded to 10k RPM drives or 15k RPM drives.  As you may have guessed, if RAID0 or RAID10 isn’t enough speed, you can put these in your server to really kick it up a notch.  These involve custom quotes, so contact us at sales (at) ubiquityservers (dot) com for more information about upgrading to a higher RPM hard drive.

Spare HDD – Lets say you want backups, but you only want to run them once a day.  A good way to save money is to add another drive to the server, but leave it unRAIDed (you save money by not using a RAID card.)  Then, simply use it to back up your main drive during off hours.

This blog post isn’t even close to a complete analysis of each type of upgrade, but hopefully it was able to give you an overview of what your options are.

As your site grows, your hardware might need to as well.  In fact, with any sizable growth, upgrading the hardware that is dishing out content to your users is inevitable.  Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at some general strategy in upgrading hardware so you get the best bang for your buck.  After all, not in your interest or our interest to waste time, money, and resources on upgrades that don’t make sense.  If this is your first Linux Dedicated Server, you might want to check out last week’s post about renting your first dedicated server.

Choosing and Upgrading the Server Memory

Memory is something you need to think about before you pick which processor you want to go with, because that will dictate what rules you play by when it comes time to consider memory.  There are two ways to upgrade your memory – upgrade to faster memory (i.e. upgrade from DDR to DDR2 or from DDR2 to DDR3) or add more of whatever you’re using.

More memory never hurts.  It doesn’t necessarily help, either (if you upgrade well beyond what you need.)  Motherboards (the main component that ties your whole server together) have a limited number of memory slots and a maximum amount of memory supported.  Eventually you’ll hit your server’s maximum amount of memory.  If this ever happens, consider upgrading in the near future.

Not all memory is equal.  As the years go by, memory, just like a computer processor, evolves and operates at higher speeds.  We currently offer three types of memory – DDR, DDR2, and DDR3.  DDR2 is twice as fast as DDR.  DDR3 is twice as fast as DDR2.  Our Celerons support DDR memory, our Xeon 3220s support DDR2 memory, and our Xeon 5520/dual Xeon 5520 support DDR3 memory.  If a tech tells you your memory is inadequate, it’s possible that upgrading processors will have the nice side effect of upgrading your memory speed.

Lastly, upgrade memory in quantities that keep it going at full speed.  Based on the ways the DIMMS (memory slots) are set up in our servers, you’ll generally want to upgrade your DDR memory in multiples of 1gb, DDR2 memory in multiples of 2gb, and DDR3 memory in multiples of 6gb.  Ask our sales team at sales (at) ubiquityhosting (dot) com for more information about your server, because it will vary from server to server.