Flutterby™! : Colocation

Ev ranting about Exodus got me in the mood. I've been deliberately vague about where I work for various reasons (and my opinions are definitely not theirs anyway!), but I'll tell you that if I were having the issues work's systems group seems to be having with the machines located at a big-name Silicon Valley colo facility (not Exodus) I'd be really concerned about some of their claims regarding redundant connections and power conditioning. It always amazes me when I see organizations rush to use services provided by companies that clearly to spend more on their salesweasels' suits than on technical infrastucture. This is why I think the Cluetrain folks are full of hoohey: consumers, especially at the corporate level, are far more interested in the appearance of progress than results.

Maybe it's the case that hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment allegedly built for redundance has a higher failure rate than an old consumer level P133 which boots off a floppy, maybe it's reasonable that I've had less net connectivity issues between me and the Flutterby servers than me and Yahoo (which I think is at Exodus) over the past three years, despite the fact that I check Yahoo very infrequently, and Flutterby several times a day. But Highertech.net seems to be way outperforming the big name colo services.