What are your thoughts on running your own datacenters?

I'm interested to see what other people like and dislike about owning/operating their own facilities and infrastructure.

Certainly, owning everything outright has lots of advantages (and responsibilities). If you have a good staff, all the better. Staying on top of contracts is paramount - always try to improve terms. What seemed great in 2008 may be horrible today.

I'd guess these are a few things you'd need to consider if you ever thought about building one,

Location
Space/Capacity
Power and Power Availability from the provider
Cooling
Routing Plans for all cabling (may require raised flooring)
Security (you may need to look deep into this especially PCI Compliance)
Staff to run the facility,
Backup Generators
Contracts for repairs to equipment like air cons, refueling the generators

Is there anyone on these forums that owns their own datacenter?

Yes, we own our data center in WestPort (west St. Louis) and have long term leases on our two data centers in downtown St. Louis.

So are you just buying transit from primary.net or owned by primary.net?

I used to own a large St Louis provider many, many years ago, so always like to keep tabs on how the market there shifts.

No, Hostirian.com and Primary.net are part of River City Internet Group (a holding company). Primary.net is our Internet Service Provider part of the solution. See rcig.net

Primary.net was launched in 1996 and sold to MPower Communications in 2000 for $145 million. When MPower pulled out of St. Louis, the previous owners of Primary.net formed River City Internet Group and relaunched Primary.net. Our infrastructure was actually upgraded by MPower because they were also selling facility based voice. Hostirian was launched by River City Internet Group in 2001.

We own 2 facilities in North Kansas City and have some colo in downtown KC while we work on another facility in NKC.

Owning a DC has a lot of different facets to it. You have to be, or know, a good electrician, plumber, mechanical contractor, lawyer... etc. It goes beyond just putting some servers in a rack and can get very expensive.

If you decide to go ahead and make the leap to build your own you'll be in for quite an education.

Did you guys start out in your owned site or did there become a point where you did the math and it worked out to be cheaper to buy one?

We started with our own owned site to support our fantasy sports leagues (CDM Fantasy Sports). We sold CDM to Fanball (Liberty Sports) a few years back.

We started in our own facility and then augmented that with some colo once we ran out of space and while we build new space. For us, since we come from a realestate development backround it's much easier and cheaper for us to own our own facilities. That has a lot to do with the backround but also the market we're in. Space, power and bandwidth are so cheap in this market that you can build a facility for cheaper than you can colo a couple racks most of the time.

Running a data center is not web hosting business or at least it is a very different niche. It is not easy to create and operate one, but it is a very good business.

It is very good option but again it is not that easy. Your design should be perfect and also there should not be any security flaw in it.

to make or run one datacenter from the start its too mutch expensive and years of hard work to get one decent.

My Long Term Goal For NerdzHost.com is to build a datacenter from the ground up and this topic has been making me think alot about what I would need to learn and know.

Along with trying to find the right people to hire for it and its various departments.


Thank you