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Hosting.com Buys XO Irvine Data Center

Posted by Rich Miller on December 27, 2005

Hosting.com has bought a California data center from XO Communications, the two firms have announced. Hosting.com, previously known as Express Technologies, did not disclose the sale price for the 36,000-square-foot square data center in Irvine, Calif. The company has existing facilities in Boston and its home base of Louisville, Ky. Hosting.com will add 15 positions as a result of the acquisition, according to president and CEO Darren King, who said the deal was financed by Harbinger Mezzanine Partners LP. He said the funding is in addition to the $3 million capital infusion Hosting.com received from the Nashville-based investment firm in early 2004.

The Irvine center, which was built at N+2 redundancy by XO, is only about 20 percent occupied at present.

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December 27, 2005

Steam: 10 Million Gigabytes of Traffic in 2005

Valve Software's Steam system has become a force in online gaming, providing the platform for Half Life 2, Counter Strike and other popular games. In a year-end update, the Steam team shares some mind-boggling traffic and bandwidth statistics, with comparative illustrations:

Steam has delivered approximately 10 million gigabytes of data since the first of the year. You could fill 125,000 80 GB hard drives with this data to make a line over 11 miles long. Not that you would want to, but the visual helps. There have been a total of 50 billion player minutes in our multiplayer games since the start of the year. If a single person sat down to play on their own, it would take 2.28 million years to accomplish this. This is assuming that you're not planning on sleeping during this 2 million year stretch.

How do they manage that load? Steam uses Limelight Networks for content distribution. Limelight offers a specialized solution for online gaming companies.

Posted by Rich Miller December 27, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter

December 22, 2005

LoadSpring Opens Second Boston Data Center

Application hosting provider LoadSpring Solutions said today that it has launched a second data center, which is being hosted in VeriCenter's Boston-area facility. The new site is hosting existing LoadSpring customers who transitioned from the provider's existing data center in southern Massachusetts, who have access to the resources needed to recover from a disaster within one business day.

"The addition of our second data center is in direct response to our customers' need of ensuring the uptime of their business-critical information, which they utilize on a day-to-day basis to keep their operations successful," said Eric Leighton, president and CEO of LoadSpring Solutions. "Opening this data center enables us to segregate resources more efficiently while providing a second platform for the CAM Console and customers needing real-time failover in the event of a disaster."

LoadSpring Solutions develops and markets an easy to use application hosting system called the CAM Console that helps large construction firms, heavy equipment manufacturers and real estate services companies outsource critical applications. Founded in 1999, LoadSpring is headquartered in Lawrence, Mass.

Posted by Rich Miller December 22, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter

December 21, 2005

Blog Service Data Center Outages Continue

Netcraft notes another outage hitting a popular blogging service, this time the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. The site was down for about 18 hour Monday as it grappled with the aftereffects of a power outage at its data center, which was operated by CRNC (Completely Reliable Network Concepts) of Denville, NJ. The provider's site doesn't offer any background on the power outage. The outage had broad impact because many bloggers integrate content from del.icio.us into their site. All in all, not a very good week for the blogosphere when it comes to reliability.

The business implications of these outages aren't quite on a par with an equivalent outage at a hosting provider serving the business sector. On some levels, the blogosphere is like one large affinity group, in which participants root for one another, are sympathetic when problems occur, and readily accept apologies for poor service. That's fortunate for Six Apart, whose recent performance would be a business disaster in any hosting niche other than blogging. The wide use of Movable Type has fostered considerable good will for the company. Bloglines and del.icio.us are separate cases because they're free services.

Posted by Rich Miller December 21, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter

December 18, 2005

Six Apart Explains TypePad Outages

Six Apart's Anil Dash sits down for an interview with Niall Kennedy to provide more information about the TypePad outage and its aftermath. There's additional back and forth in the comments. There are signs that some business users are fed up and seeking other hosting arrangements. This list of companies using TypePad includes some surprising names, including The Chicago Tribune, The Bakersfield Californian and The Toronto Star, as noted by Duncan at the Blog Herald.

Posted by Rich Miller December 18, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter

December 16, 2005

Disk Failure Fells TypePad Blog Services

TypePad is having extended performance problems after a disk failure wiped out exisiting sites. The blogs were restored from a two-day old backup, meaning the most recent posts are missing on many blogs. Users have been unable to log into the blog posting system today, but TypePad operator Six Apart is promising that the management interface will be available this evening. Once the service is fully back online, users should be able to restore lost posts with a reboot. Here's a snippet from the latest system update:

Most importantly, we want you to know that your blog data is safe. We have no reason to believe that any of your posts, comments, TrackBacks, photos or files have been lost.

TypePad has had ongoing reliability problems, which it has attributed to the challenges during a transition between data centers.

Posted by Rich Miller December 16, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter

December 14, 2005

Equinix Founder Hits It Big with Digg

Veteran data center executive Jay Adelson has hit the big time as the founder of Digg, the latest Web sensation, which is drawing comparisons to Slashdot as its swarms of readers overwhelm featured web links. Adelson, who was a co-founder and long-time executive at Equinix, has recently been interviewed by Business Week and Forbes about Digg's phenomenal success. At the end of October Digg received $2.8 million in funding from a group that included eBay founder Perre Omidyar and Netscape pioneer Marc Andreessen.

So what is Digg all about? It's an addictive site, and a great place to find the latest tech news. Bloggers and tech publications have found that it's an important traffic source, and are submitting their stories in hopes of boosting readership and ad displays. Business Week summarizes the process:

Every day its members send in around 700 ideas of things they find interesting. Each is put in an online queue where registered members can vote for their favorites. The 15 stories that garner the most votes, or diggs, are automatically published on the front page of the digg site. The next most popular stories follow on subsequent pages. Some 500,000 visitors read the site every day, a figure growing by 100,000 per month.

Many fast-growing web ventures hit a point where their success outstrips their infrastructure (TypePad is an obvious example). But in Adelson, Digg has a leader with an extraordinary understanding of peering and data centers, and how to scale a high-traffic operation. Look for continued growth for Digg.

Posted by Rich Miller December 14, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter

December 09, 2005

Peak 10 Adds Second Charlotte Data Center

Growing managed hosting provider Peak 10 said today that it will build a second data center at its Charlotte headquarters, which will give the company seven facilities. Peak 10 expanded in Raleigh, N.C. and Louisville, Ky. earlier this year. The new Charlotte data center, which is expected to be completed in late second quarter of 2006, will expand Peak 10's North Carolina footprint by 14,000 square feet.

"With three data center expansion projects since the beginning of 2005, we are responding to customer growth and the increased demand for outsourced IT services in a significant way," said David Jones, president and chief executive officer of Peak 10. "The addition of the new data center in Charlotte strengthens our presence in a significant market for our company."

Posted by Rich Miller December 09, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter

December 08, 2005

Digital Realty Cancels Deal for German Property

Digital Realty Trust said today that it has terminated a $93 million deal to purchase the IBM Technology Center near Mainz, Germany, citing the sellers' failure to meet closing conditions and other issues that arose during due diligence.

The termination was disclosed in an SEC filing by Digital Realty, which had described the acquisition as an important step in its expansion into the European data center market. DRT signaled that the deal isn't entirely dead, however, saying it intends to continue discussions with the owner under different terms. "No assurances can be given that we will enter into any agreement to acquire IBM Technology Park or that any such agreement will close," the company noted.

Posted by Rich Miller December 08, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter

Foremski: Storage Issues to Drive Outsourcing

Catching up: Last week Tom Foremski had an interesting post about storage trends on his ZDNet blog, noting that the efficiencies and cost savings available through utility computing will lead more corporations to mothball their in-house data centers and shift their equipment and data to third-party vendors operating out of stand-alone facilities. Data center service providers have been touting the likelihood of a huge migration out of in-house facilities for many years now. Make no mistake - this is a big trend, and will continue for some time to come and sustain the business models of many providers.