Guest post by Ed Kimm:
With the recent outages that affected Bing Travel, Allrecipes, Authorize.net, Redfin and many others that were all hosted at Internap it becomes even more important to know as much as possible about your hosting provider. Something could also be said for understanding the eed for redundancy.
Here are the top questions for hosting providers.
- How long have you been in business?
- How many customers do you support?
- What size clients do you work with?
- What are your SLA and network uptime guarantees?
- How many backbone providers do you support?
- Is your in-house network a BGP or HSRP setup?
- Does the service include backup UPS or generator?
- Can you provide references?
- How many data centers do you have?
- What are your response times for customer service (on call 24x7x365, ticketing system, etc)?
Ed Kimm is a partner at Wowrack, a full-service IT Consultancy serving businesses since 2001.
About nathan kaiser
Great article Ed, I am glad you share your insights for all start up founders on nPost. Most of them are very good in programming but when it comes to telco related issues, these 10 points can really help them to save the day.
Remember, it doesn’t matter how COOL your apps are or how GOOD you wrote your codes, the bottom line is AVAILABILITY to get out on the Internet. By using a reliable partner, Ed Kimm, as an example, will save you lots of work to maintain the highest uptime possible.
In my recent meeting with Mr. Kimm, we exchanged the idea of a Hybrid solution. He was right on the concept and if you decide to contact him, please mention you read this on nPost blog. The Hybrid is one of the greatest idea and I am personnal using it for my new product launch.
As far as Wowrack’s SLA, I called them and the call was answered within a minute. Way faster than most of the Tier 1 telco I have worked for in the past.
Good luck, only comes if you choose the right partner!
Ian
That list of ten questions is a good start but would not have kept everyone affected by the recent fire out of trouble. I’d add questions like:
1. Does your facility provide water and/or gas fire suppression? Why and where?
2. What downtime events have you had in the past? What was the cause? How long did they last?
And I’m sure the datacenter experts can add more -
All good points, but bigger help in this case is two separated facilities. Westin + Fisher, or even Westin/Fisher + an Eastside datacenter.
Disclosure: I run public datacenters in the Westin, Redmond, and Bellevue.
Asking about the fire protection is a good question, but if you dig deeper on this topic the additional question is,
1. do you have a clean agent suppression system or Sprinkler and just how much of the facility is protected. Just in the data center itself or are the backup generators and electrical rooms protected. Some recent fires had the data center protected but not the back up generators or transformers. Data is protected but when the site losses power clients are out of business until power is restored.
Clean Agents provide greater protection than Sprinklers as the recovery time is generally much less with a clean agent system. Clean Agents put out a fire with Gas (HFC-125/ECARO-25, HFC-227ea/FM-200, IG-55/ProInert) and do not leave a residue or water on the equipment and floor.
These are all good questions, many will be avoided at all costs by the provider. One additional side note about the hosting industry (based on personal experience) is that you get what you pay for. It’s best to have a quality provider that can handle scalability and give good customer service when needed.
Rackspace is another with power outages that has affected many people, including Toodledo, the service I use for GTD management.
Gee that sounded like a commercial… sorry bout that.
Isn’t it also true though that sometimes “shit happens?”
But your points are sound; thanks for sharing and I will indeed ask those questions next time.