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Comment by reedlaw | Hacker News Reader

Where would you go to find a "condo"? There are no links in the article. What is the pricing/reliability/support like having your own server in someone else's data center?

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What this (very good) post calls the "condo" tier is what the hosting industry calls "co-lo" or "co-location". Search that term and you'll get more options than you can probably wade through. The "rackspace" option (biggest name for good quality mid-tier sized setups) is http://www.equinix.com/

Huffington Post, Gawker, BuzzFeed, CafeMom and AdMeld all co-lo with http://www.datagram.com/, most of them are within a few feet of each other.

Equinix is a little on the expensive side... Just a little bit.

I've found a lot of good information and deals at webhostingtalk.com. It is a just a forum where the webhosting providers big, small, and in-between meet and share.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with webhostingtalk -- just a user there.

Search for colocation in your area, then call and ask. I'm paying around $70/month for a 1U server with a fixed amount of bandwidth. Reliability and support (aside from network issues) are up to you.

Most datacenters should be pretty good on support and reliability of things like the connection, power, etc. Otherwise it's all up to you to support your box and to make sure you buy reliable hardware.

Search for [colocation].

Also make sure to hire someone who has done it before if you want to go that route. "Racking" is an art-form in itself and the cabling alone can turn into a real problem[1] down the road if you take it too lightly for too long. You also want to plan for redundancy, power density etc. from the start.

Sorting out messy cabling or adding redundancy to a badly managed rack on live hardware is not fun.

[1] http://www.vibrant.com/cable-messes.php (for reference, this is what it should look like: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/01/24/when-data-center-cabling...)

Not a huge fan of zipties, honestly... there's a point where it's less trouble to just pull the cable and see what it's attached to, especially since we all get lazy when it comes to labeling our source/dest endpoints.

Most of the shots of "cable messes" don't really look that unacceptable to me. I don't complain about messy cables until they start to look more like http://static.cray-cyber.org/General/LARGE/Cyber_860_BP_Skys... .

Matter of pain threshold I guess. Personally I prefer spending the odd hour on tidy zipping and labeling (yes, both ends of the cable) over cable-pulling during an emergency at 4am...

As a matter of opinion I use zipties for permanent cables (tray runs, other mostly fixed cabling), and velcro ties for in-rack where they're more likely to be updated. But then again zip ties are cheap and it's sometimes just easier to cut them off then mess with the velcro.

Indeed, when I wrote "zipping" I actually meant velcro.

We're doing it pretty much the same way (in some racks we even have a velco-strip on the side as "parking zone").

Don't use zipties as much as possible. A roll of velcro cable ties cut to length is much easier to handle and reconfigure.

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