Well, I've actually done the hosting thing in a past life and I have to
tell you that it is a thankless job. Wearing a page 24x7x365 is not
exactly exciting. Getting up at 2:00 AM to drive into the NOC to correct
a problem in order to fulfill your Service Level Agreement and not lose
revenue can be challenging. I've had times when I had to work 36 hours
straight to pull off a major upgrade that went south on us due to small
variables that nobody had realized would be critical.
So when I moved back home from the greater Boston area I looked around
for someone else within the state that could offer a hosting service on
Linux servers that provided a lot of flexibility, no pager headaches,
and a reasonable price so that I could have a place to serve my client's
websites from.
The sad part is that I found no local business that met the
requirements. Because of the nature of the work hosting is definitely
one of those things that becomes much cheaper per customer as you scale
up. So I ended up using a Linux hosting company out of Utah that is not
even remotely associated with RackSpace (I had a client that used them
and suffered from terrible service.)
So I got myself setup as a hosting reseller and that has worked out very
well for me. I can do the admin that I need to on the servers and they
take care of the rest.
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.
Dan
Mike Raley wrote:
ya know, I've often thought about running my own hosting business on the side, virtual hosts, on a monthly fee through some of the local colo and ISPs. It's the economic inability to compete with the non local providers which has stopped me. Is this something where a local Co-op model might be an efficient way to go? Is there enough of a "buy local" segment in the local IT people to make something like this work?
Mike
On Mar 22, 2009, at 2:59 PM, Forest Bond wrote:
Why limit yourself to local options?
Because it is the Vermont way. :-) Local business to local
business. Locally owned, locally served, organic Internet.
Well, you get the idea.
