I am currently thinking about moving my services to a new datacenter. While I have a list of questions to ask, I was wondering if I could get some help completing my list.

What questions would you ask when picking a new datacenter?

Pleae don't post or PM me with any datacenter offers. I'll start a new thread for that :)

Any help is greatly appreciated!

1. Power redundancy: do they have generators, if yes, how often do they test them, do they have redundant generator ? Good datacenter should test they're generators at least once every 2 weeks. It's important, I have seen 2 redundant generators fail during power outage because they were never tested which resulted in 12 hours of downtime, while a different dc in the same building worked just fine (tested every friday).

2. Fire protection: obviously sprinklers are not acceptable here :)

3. Network redundancy and ability to stand against DDoS attacks, this is really important because some datacenters have only 100mbps or so links to backbone providers and in case of an attack on one of the customers you will suffer. Good datacenter should have at least 2 redundant 1Gbps uplinks to backbone providers. Also you should ask if they have vlans per customer/server. If they don't they will encounter many network capacity problems while they grow and probably end up having problems like burstnet used to have.

4. 24x7 staff: at least one tech should be at the datacenter at night and you should get direct phone # or other means of reaching the tech at night or off hours.


These are the most important questions I would ask.

What is the policy for replacing hardware in a colocated server?


Cheers,
Matthew

Thanks “GreggCZ” for your information it is also cleared some of my questions too.