[RTC List] Fw: Re Happy Holiday Wishes from Cole Machado

[William Van Hefner]

Bob,

If your office isn't safe for servers during an earthquake, I sure hope
that you have a good escape plan for yourself! As for electricity, that's
what UPS' and back-up generators are made for. With the new wireless
providers in our area, achieving redundancy is already relatively simple
task for any business (or school district, hospital, government, etc.)
that demands it. At least one (very rural and underfunded) school district
in the area has complete redundancy via both fiber and wireless.

The main reason to use out-of-the-area server farms is cost. If you sell
hosting, you can make more of a profit by buying wholesale service from a
server farm than you can from maintaining your own network and servers.
Redundancy is no longer an issue here. Money is. Becoming a hosting
company entails a lot of start-up capital. Simply becoming a reseller (or
middleman) for some other hosting company requires virtually no investment
in hardware and is simple enough that very little technical expertise is
required.

I know of a few hosting companies that still exist here in Humboldt, and
they largely stay in business because local businesses like doing business
locally. I don't know of any who operate out of their "living rooms".
There are also plenty of data centers in the area that do everything
locally, and who do not "outsource". They have found ways to keep their
network connectivity and power reliable. As a result, they employ more IT
personnel, pay excellent wages and contribute a great deal to our local
economy. Where there is a will, there is a way, even in Humboldt County.

FYI, NO, I do not sell hosting service and am not here to plug anything.


-- 
William Van Hefner
President - Vantek Communications, Inc.
e-mail: vantek at humboldtonline.com


On Fri, December 26, 2008 6:48 am, Bob Morse wrote:
> Hosting has been part of our business for years and we've never had an
> issue with the fiber line since our servers are not located in Humboldt
> County. We use servers in robust data centers with plenty of network and
> power redundancy (it's not just the fiber that's unreliable in Humboldt
> County). We have root access and manage the servers remotely. The
> servers are monitored 24 hours/day. There are people on hand to manually
> reboot a server  if necessary (seldom) or replace hardware if there is a
> failure.  Why would we locate servers in our Old Town office in a building
> that still has not been earthquake retrofitted? Are there really still
> hosting companies in the county that keep their servers in their office or
> living room?
>
> I think you would have found our service quite reliable. In fact, we
> started hosting because of constant issues with inflexible server
> configuration, reliability, and poor support from other hosting companies
> when developing web sites for clients.
>
> Cole Machado wrote:
>
>> Humboldt county was never really seriously looked at because
>> I couldn't give a good recommendation of a reliable web host in the
>> area. Even when I had my hosting company here in Humboldt it was scary
>> when ever the fiber optic line got "cut". yeah it may not seem like long
>> but even if we had to be down for an hour it made our company look bad.
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