While physical location of the hosting is of little relevance to the hosting customers, it is important to the hosting services themselves. Microsoft and Google are both buying land to build data centers in the Columbia River valley up near Portland because of the availability of cheap, dependable hydro power.
Access to cheap power is another thing that improves with scale and is a barrier to local/co-op hosting businesses. Rene Dan Coutu wrote:
To make Mike's idea work you'd need to secure hundreds of customers (or more) and have a significant sized facility with generator backup, redundant high bandwidth connections, and a crew of at least 9 operations personnel to provide round the clock monitoring and support. That's a very significant investment. I don't know if it could be made to work since, as Mike points out, there is strong competition from non-local providers and to a large extent the physical location of hosting servers is becoming less relevant as time goes on.
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