[lug] colocation

[Jonathan Corbet]

> What kind of range of cost have people
> here found for server colocation with similar bandwidth (this is
> non-commercial for me, so cost does matter)?

FWIW, LWN.net lives at Netrack.  They start at $200/month for 200 kb/sec
bandwidth.  They, um, charge us rather more than that these days, but it
took us a surprisingly long time to exceed that low-seeming bandwidth
number.

We've been most pleased with the arrangement.  We can run whatever services
we want, there's been no hassle in getting additional IP addresses, and we
have keys so we can get at the system any time we need to.  We find that
last one important, even if the system has rebooted all of once in the last
two years.  We also don't depend on anybody else to keep the system secure,
which adds to our peace of mind.

That said, if all you're up to is setting up a non-commercial web site, you
might as well start with a hosting arrangement until experience pushes you
to something more expensive.  If, instead, the cvs and game servers are
highly important, you'll probably need to look at colocation.

jon

Jonathan Corbet
Executive editor, LWN.net
corbet at eklektix.com