Where Businesses Go for Internet Reliability (NYT)

Where Businesses Go for Internet Reliability

By DAVID STROM

THE premier addresses of the Internet age include 56 Marietta Street in Atlanta, 210 North Tucker Avenue in St. Louis and 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. They go by a variety of names, like carrier hotels, Internet peering points and co-locations. And while they may not be located in the fanciest office buildings, and many of them are not in the best parts of town, they are the best places for businesses to get online, taking advantage of huge swaths of reliable bandwidth at a relatively low cost.

Small businesses can lease space in a co-location building and use their own server computers and other hardware to operate Web sites, for example, or handle e-commerce. Or more likely they can use the services of companies like Slicehost.com, which has its own servers at the St. Louis building and provides access to “virtual private” areas on them for fees starting at $20 a month.

Co-location buildings like these sit at major crossroads of Internet connectivity. Most, like 1102 Grand Boulevard in Kansas City, Mo., have electrical power that comes from more than one connection to the power grid, along with battery backups and diesel generators to further protect against blackouts.

At 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, between 15th and 16th Streets, there is an elevator big enough to lift a fully loaded truck to each floor, in case a customer has lots of equipment to deliver. But reliable Internet connections are the main appeal of co-location buildings, particularly for companies that earn significant revenue from their Internet businesses, which need to be running all the time.

“We wanted to make sure that our largest customers, like Domino’s Pizza, could have ‘five nines’ up time,” or 99.999 percent reliability, said David Schenberg, chief executive of BusyEvent in Chesterfield, Mo., which provides automated communications, online invitation and meeting registration services. BusyEvent uses Xiolink.com’s data center at another St. Louis building and has not had a single service failure, Mr. Schenberg said.

A second attraction is location, but not in the sense that real estate agents typically use. In this case, it means nearby fiber-optic connections to Internet carriers, so that businesses can avoid the expense of installing their own fiber-optic cables.

Fiber-optic connections are vital for many businesses because they offer the highest and most reliable bandwidth. Another advantage of co-location, said Joel Snyder, senior partner at Opus One, a co-location services provider in Tucson, Ariz., is that there are usually multiple fiber-optic connections to multiple carriers, so Internet traffic can be handled efficiently, particularly during peak times.

Companies like Opus One can cater to the needs of a variety of customers, from the smallest startup to multinational corporations, depending on their needs.

One challenge for businesses that use co-location is getting comfortable with the loss of some degree of control over computer services. Another, for those companies that decide not to use their own hardware, is finding the right server company to fit the circumstances. Some are thousands of miles away, and a business may want servers located closer to their home base.

But distance can also be an advantage. Many overseas businesses are buying services at American co-locations because they want their servers closer to American customers.

“We sell a lot of our space to Australians,” Mr. Snyder said, “because the cost of their Internet connectivity to the U.S. is higher than if they were to locate their servers here.”

Some server providers offer equipment management services, including backups, updates, routine maintenance and troubleshooting. Others, like Slicehost, offer no extras: just “ping, power and an Internet pipe,” to keep costs down.

“You have to know what you are doing,” said Matt Tanase, Slicehost’s founder. “We aren’t going to help you troubleshoot your applications or set up your database servers.”

If you need one or two servers, it makes sense to have the co-location provider manage the equipment. But if your business’s needs increase, there are companies that specialize in keeping servers running and updated.

“Running your own servers is like a pizza shop trying to fix their own delivery trucks,” said Malcolm Mead, chief executive of the Mead Group, a co-location provider in Seattle.

The biggest challenge for the people running co-locations is persuading business owners that they can do better by outsourcing their server capacity.

“You don’t want to treat your servers as pets,” Mr. Snyder of Opus One said. “You shouldn’t have to see them and touch them very often, and having them in a co-location facility gets you out of doing things the sloppy way, because it makes it more difficult to get to your computers.”