Web Hosting Blog :: Ubiquity Hosting Solutions

1) Our network. We run our entire network over Brocade XMR-4000 routers, not a Cisco Switch that could just as easily be a rack level switch like a lot of our competitors do.

2) Our service. Our support team is here 24/7/365.  We can be reached by phone, livechat, or email any time of the day or year and you’ll always get a timely response.

3) We care. You’re not just another number with us, while we’re certainly not small, we’re still not too big – we establish relationships with our customers and for this reason most of our customers stick around for a long time.

4) We back up what we say. We offer a 100% uptime SLA on power and network as well as a 1 hour hardware replacement SLA.  If we can’t meet that, you get a credit on your account.

5) Our locations. Six locations mean your project can expand across the entire US.  It may not apply directly to you on just one server, but we do offer services in six cities across the US, so if you need more than one server, there’s no need to try new vendors – you can go with us for almost, if not all, of your USA server needs.  Even if it’s not relevant now, it’s useful for future expansion.

Choosing where to put your servers is often underestimated.  Ubiquity offers services out of six geographic locations, covering the continental United States.  We offer services out of Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle.

Why do you need to consider this? Well, ultimately data has to travel from either yourself or your users to the server and back to you or your users again.  Even though, for the most part, it’s traveling at the speed of light, there is a noticable difference between when data travels 2000 miles and when it travels 20 miles. It’s particularly noticeable on with streaming content and less noticable with static pages that are mostly text, but it’s never, never, never bad to reduce latency to your server.

When considering where to put your server, put it as close as possible to the population center of your users.  If you’re a Chicago Cubs fan stranded in Dallas, it’s probably wise to put your Chicago Cubs fan site in our Chicago data center instead of our Dallas datacenter.  It’s a bit of an extreme illustration, but hopefully it illustrates what we’re going for here – you want to get your server as close to your users as possible and sometimes that means further from you.

If your users are everywhere, the general wisdom is to get as close to major population centers as possible.  Lets take the example of a site that is visited predominately by Americans.  You’ll obviously want to pick something close to the center of the United States so you can reach all of your users, but which center? Dallas or Chicago?  Consider the three largest cities in the United States, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.  Placing your server in Chicago puts it close two two of those, so Chicago might be wise.

All in all though, for most web hosting content, anywhere within a few thousand miles is pretty darn good.  With game servers and voice servers, a few hundred miles is much, much better.

While some colocation is fairly static and remains the same year after year, most colocation involves careful planning of future growth.  There are a lot of things to consider when planning this growth.  Here are some things to think through.

1)  Realistic Growth Speed. I can’t count how many startups come to us asking about a full cabinet for their 1u server “so we have room to grow.”  Believe it or not, sometimes they fill in the cabinet, sometimes they go bankrupt.  The important point here is that it’s very easy to overbuy colocation so that you can grow into it.  Sure, colocating 42 devices is cheaper per device than 5 devices are per device.  But is it cheaper to have a little bit of downtime later on (to move your equipment) or is it cheaper to swallow the larger monthly recurring cost to allow yourself room.  There isn’t a right answer for everyone, but there is a right answer for you.

2) Know when to rent. Keep in mind that if you have to ship servers to and from the datacenter regularly, it may make more sense to rent them in the first place.  Shipping adds up and it’s just money out the window.  Sometimes customers try to get the most out of 1u by slowly upgrading it from a low end server to a medium server, to a high end server, all the while the shipping costs are adding up.  Maybe it makes sense for you, but don’t forget to factor that in.

3) Give yourself time. A huge mistake we see nearly every day (seriously!) with colocation is waiting until the last minute to pull the trigger on upgrades.  Not all upgrades are instant. Seriously.  If you need a cross connect, it can take up to two months for all of the necessary parties (telcos are notorious for slow times like this) to pass off all the paperwork and complete all the labor.  Plan well ahead for major upgrades and at least know the lead times.  Sorry, we simply can’t deploy 100 cabinets overnight.

Those three tips should set you well on your way.  Mistakes in planning colocation can be very costly, so definitely plan the project ahead of time.