How to you choose a good Data center

It very is important in what Tier category it fits. It is also very important what kind of connectivity (IP bandwidth providers) does the DC have in house and whether it is a carrier-neitral or not. My suggestion to anyone is to go for carrier neutral facilities. One more thing to consider is the price of remote hands. it does not make sense to sign up with DC that charges above $150 per hour, unless it is in location you need to be.

Other important information in Wikipedia - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_center
 
Some questions to ponder when selecting a data center:
  • What types of security policies do they have in place?
  • What is their power availability and history of outages?
  • What cooling scheme do they employ?
  • How do they monitor security and network health?
  • What alerts do they have in place? (fire, smoke, moisture?)
  • What are the prices of their services, including hands on?
  • What is their SLA?
  • Do they offer dedicated ports?
  • Who are their upstream providers?
  • Do they test their backup generators?
  • Do they offer A/B power?
  • Do they offer livechat support?
  • Do they have 800 phone support?
  • Do you feel comfortable communicating with their sales and support staff?
  • Do they offer BGP?
  • Is their center accessible?
  • Are they growing?
  • How quick do they respond to support tickets?
  • How do they handle DDOS attacks?
  • Do they post network status?
  • What types of cabinets do they offer?
  • Can you customize power to your requirements?
  • What is their policy on additional IP's?
  • Do they offer KVM services? Crash carts?
  • Do they offer managed backups?
  • Do they offer cross connects?
 
When choosing a datacenter, i recommend trying to look at reviews about the datacenter your looking at, see the features and how much bandwidth, ip's etc.. cost then determine the location you need and last of all, if they have a sales support and a phone, contact them for a quote or more information to find out more about the company and datacenter.
 
If you're a customer looking to rent a server or colocate a server from a datacenter, I'd say these are "some" key points (obviously there are others):
  • How long have they been in business
  • Are they a registered company?
  • What kind of support do they offer? (If pure unmanaged be sure you're aware of this).
  • How have others felt abut their business?
  • Price (I personally am the type to pay a little more then normal for better service).
  • Network/Hardware specs
  • Types of contact if you face issues (e.g. Phone, email, etc).
  • Hours of operation
  • Read the TOS/AUP

Oh yeah, do a speed test too and make sure their network works well for your customer/client base.
 
You always need to start the search based your real requirements. The top data center always come with top costs
 
Check for the standard 'data center' things such as power, bandwidth, CRACK/HVAC, etc. Once you confirm they have the basics, ask questions -- lots of questions.

Ask them:
- how long they have been in business & who owns it. This tells a lot because they will not stay in business if they are not profitable. Taking a few minutes to do a little research on the owners can save you a lot of hassles down the road. If they have been in court once a year for the past ten years, ask them why.
- if they own or lease their space (don't work with someone that only has a cage in a big DC -- you are too far down the line and will be left in the dark if there are problems)
- if they own or lease their equipment. If someone is leasing all of their equipment, you can run into problems when their lease is up and they are forced to buy it out or send the equipment back to the leasing company
- ask them straight out if they are profitable & how many years they running they have been profitable
- ask them what happens when x problem happens
- ask them when they had their last outage (be specific and say server, rack, cage, data center wide outage), why it happened, and what they did to make sure it doesn't happen again. If they say they've never been out - run.

If you are looking local, ask around, check the forums, do some simple searches, and go visit their facility.

If it is a fit, you'll know it pretty quick. If you do not get the warm feeling, move on to the next one.

Hope this helps.
 
Some good answers above but the main thing you should watch out for is redundancy. Ask their sales, ask to speak to manager if they dont sound confident. Make sure there is no single point of failure with the network.

Also make sure they have a sensible abuse policy. If you do hosting or have multiple open source web apps you WILL get abuse reports, make sure it isnt one of the kind that suspend you over spamcops and the like. Make sure they give you at least a 48 hour abuse resolution time.

Then other factors are location, traceroute/ping to your user's geographic area. Also KVM/IPMI is a must as well.
 
All kidding aside, there is a plethora of things to look for when choosing a data center. Networks, Redundancy, Power systems, disaster plans, SLAs, etc. to name a few
 
Various things like Power supply, Internet connectivity, Backup or data storage, Security measures, Server hardware quality, Support services, Uptime guarantee etc must be taken into consideration before selecting any Datacenter.
 
One thing I never see discussed on forums concerning data centers is office space. For some companies, having an office inside the data center itself is critically important.
 
Just choose a data center that is time-tested and have positive reviews by users. Choose this data center with excellent uptime, system redundancy, solid network etc..
 
The datacenter should have reliable support which is always ready to help and resolve the server issues ASAP. For example, I used to buy a dedicated server from Fastnext and when I had some hardware issues , their support answered all the tickets within 15-20 minutes and finally they resolved my problems within 1 hour.
 
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