Depends on what you need. If you need cheap labor working your datacenter, then yes, go to the Philippines. If you need the lowest latency to users in the United States, you’ll need to have a datacenter with great connectivity…in the United States.

My personal opinion is that both datacenters in and outside of the U.S. will grow in the future…but I am not worried about datacenters in other countries because no matter how cheap the labor is, there are a lot of latency and bandwidth issues to overcome before those become viable for most U.S.-based services.

Right. That’s exactly what I was thinking. A golden opportunity for those who can bring a complete package to the market. Of course, the reason it hasn’t been done yet is that it will take some software/hardware development to get all of those things into a nice, slick, easy-to-deploy package. However, it’s still an idea worth investing in due to its large potential.

Marin (typo?) Allred and Alex Bentenaro — your IP addresses are the same. Nice try with the multiple names, there. My company wouldn’t be successful if it didn’t have some differentiation from its competitors. We are local to the Bay Area and host startup companies that want to work with a company whose owner/employees they can see face to face. We price reasonably and differentiate based on service… and, judging from our YOY revenue numbers, we’re doing quite well at it.

I’m curious to know what either you or Schwartz think this new datacenter paradigm will be. I don’t doubt that different applications will appear in datacenters, but I do think the main hardware components (switches/routers/servers) will remain essentially similar — with virtualization being an interesting trend to watch, but not changing the overall look and feel of a datacenter. I welcome your opinion on how things would change.

By the way, our Niagara’s regularly womp our Intel machines… by a very wide margin. Maybe you’re running the wrong type of work on them.

These are the places that’ve been around the block with using the brother-in-law as the “IT Director” and are tired of getting jakey service. You make a good point, set up 10 companies at $5k/month = 50k month, hire 3 reboot/tape-swap monkeys ($12k/month) and one talent to set it up ($6k/month) and you’re still making enough to fund your hardware/rent and sales force.

Hell, you could get slick and sell a complete package (A webserver + email + 1 TB fileserver for only $5,999.95k/month!!!! What a deal!!!!) to the teeming masses. Do it right, and you can clone all the new servers, so new installation is e-z and can be done by a monkey. As more servers come on line, just continue to add monkeys to pick up the slack.