From time to time people, usually those considering hosting with us, ask me about our data center. Usually it's people that have had a bad experience with some guy who hosted their last site out of his basement, or with some small hosting company that was there one day, and gone the next along with all their data.

I also thought that there are probably a lot of people out there that have never seen what a professional data center looks like. They may have only seen the "server room" at their local office. It's quite a sight to behold if you've never seen one. 

So with those two reasons in hand I figured it might be an interesting blog topic. Maybe more people wanted to know and just never asked. So I went down to the data center today and snapped a few photos so you could see what it looks like. Me telling you is one thing. Me showing you is something else.

Inevitably people then ask about the stats of the data center. So here goes. The data center is monitored by real humans 24/7 (see photo). There are nine fiber connections (multi-homed) to nine different bandwidth providers. There is enough battery backup for 15 minutes, which is enough to turn on the redundant 6 megawatt diesel generators, which can run the data center indefinitely. The data center also has a massive battery of air cooling units, which you can see in one bank of in the photos. Most of our servers are actually towers rather than rack mounted units, because they were cheaper to buy until recently. Rack mounted or tower, all of our servers are Dell PowerEdge boxen (see photos).

In general, the data center is state of the art. Not bleeding edge, but still very good. And most importantly it's not in my basement. =)