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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

A perfect example of the time-wasting that he says you should avoid.

Maybe for 1 or 2 servers in a quarter rack; but all of these questions and concerns are very salient if you are filling full rack(s) or cages and plan to get your own ASN and such (as any serious internet company should, since otherwise you are not PART OF THE INTERNET). Not getting the answers to these questions is the difference between quite a lot of pain, heartache, and money spent or having everything run (relatively) smoothly.

I have to agree his list is a little unfortunate. It contains all the basic questions that you should ask (responsibilities/transits/power density etc.), but then also rather specialized things (PDUs, RFOs) that are a little over the top when you're going to rent half a rack without significant growth perspective.

That said, the colo should indeed answer all these questions. It's just that most small shops will not be able to make sense of the answers...

If you're a small shop looking to dip a toe into colo then a good summary question to ask is "Who else do you host?". If they have a few big-names to share then they'll probably be good enough for you, too.

Ideally ask for permission to ring up one or two of their reference customers and then actually do that. Colos don't like that very much - but if they outright refuse then you'll know to better look at another one.

Ideally, most of this would be on a provider's website. Unfortunately, the NAPs of the world rely on multi-level sales staffing that present what they think is important(or differentiates them). The smaller colos who envision themselves the equivalent of the NAPs refrain from sharing much info as well and then the consumer ends up in a dim corner of "kinda/sorta generally acceptable commodity(service and quality) level colocation." It is then your burden to translate that to a customer why their LOLcats website is loading slowly for Uncle Bob. SLAs are hard and most providers treat them like a joke. If you're a startup and want to pass the buck, then just go with AWS. There is a solution for everyone.

Yeah, I find this incredibly irritating. Just getting the real price can take months of back and forth. On the low end, the cost of just the negotiation can dominate everything else.

Indeed and yet for someone who has been doing it for years, all of this can be identified in a matter of minutes. In the same vein, most programmers today don't need to know Assembly. It just depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

A little time wasting upfront can save you massive heartbreak down the road. When I started our company we went with a very small startup datacenter for our colo. Imagine my surprise when the colo's HVAC failed and they subsequently went out of business. Having those servers driven halfway across the country while all of our sites were completely down was an absolutely horrible, stressful experience.

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