This will start to be a pretty small operation, so the idea of having the servers at my finger tips and all that really sounded appealing. I initially was leaning toward co-location, but just the "neat" factor turned me around. But it sounds like that really is the best option, especially for the price tag. As "lame" as that may be.
Thanks for all the feedback, gave me a lot of options to look at.
Eric
Josh Coates wrote:
So what are our options if we want to keep the equipment in-house?
you should consider getting over the "keeping it in house" idea - just get a couple of U's of rackspace at a colo provider, and sign up for their minimum bandwidth commitment. it'll set you back a few hundred per month, but everything will work just fine (btw - most colos do not have 4-5 major backbone providers - they usually have 1-2, sometimes 3 - but they do have more bandwidth than you will ever need, and redundant power and cold air). i suggest starting out by checking out xmission and go from there.
if you want to keep the equipment in house, you better be close to a CO, and DSL should be just fine. if you are far away (> 25K feet) then you are SOL, and need to go with a colo.
for DSL, check out speakeasy - type in your address and they will be able to tell you how far away you are from the nearest CO. they are the most technical, no-nonsense isp out there. they know what they are doing and should be able to hook you up.
all the T1, DS3 reliability, low-latency, blah blah stuff is nonsense. a T1 will set you back ~$500/mo and the only thing it'll be good for is that it's a full 1.5Mbit symmetric and you can call to complain if something doesnt work out. if you are close to the CO, and your isp is full-service wrt to static ips then your dsl line will work just fine. latency is all about the same.
but you should really colo it somewhere - it'll save you a lot of headache in the long run.
HTH, YMMV, etc.
Josh Coates http://www.jcoates.org
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