birdhouse hosting has been in slow-growth, word-of-mouth mode for six months now and I’ve learned a few lessons, found out where my target audience is, and narrowed down the focus of the business. Time to crank it up a notch. Just got a business license and a birdhouse bank account, and made the decision to invest in a faster, beefier server, to be located in a data center with redundant connections, power supplies, hardware monitoring, etc.
In the midst of research, realized that it made more sense to lease a server and bandwidth together. Over the next few weeks I’ll be migrating accounts and systems over to a new 1.7GHz P4 blade running RedHat 9 at Sonic.net. I’ve been pretty committed to OS X hosting, but the lease I’m getting through Sonic is too good to pass up, and most of the hosting software in ISP-land is specifically geared toward Linux. In the future, when the business is fully self-sustaining, I’ll want to own the server, and at that point will likely switch back to an XServe, but for now it just makes sense for birdhouse to go this route.
Power outage? Hah!
Our power plant facilities consist of utility power backed by a 24 liter V-12 twin turbocharged Detroit Diesel generator, which generates 1024 horsepower and 750,000 watts of power.
Though I have never colo’d a server there, I have nothing but wonderful things to say about Sonic. They are a smart, customer-oriented ISP that is growing, but not so fast that they’ve become one of the “big nasties.” And their reliability is exceptional. I cannot recall any noteworthy outages in the nearly two years I’ve been there. Great choice.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I’ve had *excellent* dealings with them via phone over the next few days.
BTW, great job with the Mosaic site – another MT-as-CMS success story.
One thing I learned during my CCNA course is that if you can colocate, it’s a whole crapload cheaper to go that route than to get the redundant links, backup power, and so forth to a site of your own. Even if you have multiple secondary sites needing to connect to your primary site, it’s still cheaper. In the case of my CCNA project, (since it was all on paper anyway) I colocated my central servers with Qwest and used DSL to connect all the remote sites. It would be nice if real life connectivity was so simple (I can’t even get DSL to my home out of Qwest in real life) but on paper it saved a fortune.
-Jim