Datacenter and Colocation Discussions

Customers may choose you, but its also important to choose who you want as a customers. For years, I have been telling people that one secret to success in the datacenter business is be picky when it comes to what kind of customers you decide to provide service to. This may go counter to popular ideas about business, that is, anyone willing to pay should be a customer of mine. That may hold true is you sell hamburgers, but when you sell datacenter space and IP backbone access, its very important that you stay away from certain types of customers.

Customers I traditionally avoid:

1. Gamers
2. Adult Sites
3. Email Marketers
4. Proxy Providers

Why should the above group be avoided? Lets look at the four factors that make a customer undesirable. First, can they pay their bills reliably. Second, will they be a long term customer. Third, will they require a lot of customer service. Fourth, will they impact your resources negatively.

Gamers fail three of the four key criteria, they are bad at paying bills, they are not long term clients, they dont require a lot of assistance, but they do negatively impact network utilization and are more prone to DDoS attacks. Adult Sites can be good payers and can be long term clients, but they also require a lot of assistance and have a negative impact, adult sites get DDoS attacks frequently, their bandwidth usage is highly volatile, and their actions of handling illegally copyrighted material cause major headaches and liabilities. Email Marketers fail all four criteria, they’re short term clients, are not good payers, abuse IP resources, and are strong DDoS targets because everybody hates spammers. Proxy Providers are interesting, they are good payers and long term clients, but they have a lot of baggage since proxy providers can’t control what the users behind the proxy do. In our experience, proxy providers cause a lot of headaches and generate a ton of abuse complaints from their proxy clients doing everything from sending spam to running botnet attacks.

Your are the company you keep….

The type of people you have in your datacenter should reflect who you are as a business. I run a very stable, reputable business, so as such, I prefer that my customers be stable, reputable businesses. In the long term, this philosophy has worked very well for me.

We recently switched over to a new VOIP provider for our phone services. In the past we were using one of those large national providers, service was okay, but it could be much better. Telecom is normally treated as a commodity, that is, if all the features are there its a matter of who has the lowest price. Yes, everyone has the same features, and prices can vary, but there are several intangible aspects that you cant easily identify.

We decided to use a local VOIP provider who is in our area because we felt that having local access to the company would be beneficial. The provider, Essenz, Inc., is based in Lafayette Hill, PA – just 20 miles or so from our offices. Their business phone solution had all the features we were looking for and the price was very competitive. Best of all, the phones were personally delivered to our location and setup by a technician – this is free and included in their service. Because they are local, they also offer same day (4 hour response) hardware replacement if the phone fails.

These bonus features make all the difference, and trust me, if your phone dies, waiting 1-2 business day for a replacement to be shipped is not ideal. I encourage people to look locally first, you’ll be amazed how many great providers are right in your backyard.

We all hear how its good to buy our produce locally, but what about buying web hosting services locally. Interestingly, your company will be better off if you host with a local provider, and it has nothing to do with better support and everything to do with search engines and regionality.

Search Engines such as Google or Bing like LOCAL results

When you do an internet search, the search engine knows where you are and in turn will display search results that are close to your region. For example, if you do a search for lawyers, Google will undoubtedly return results for law offices in your area. It does this using IP geography. From your IP address, Google has a rough idea of why you are in the world.

The same technology that determines where you are located can be used to determine where a website/company is located. Now lets be honest, search engines know that most websites are hosted outside their served region. However, if your website is hosted from an IP with a geographic footprint of say Ohio, and your business is in Ohio and mentions this in the indexable content on your site (mailing address, area code, ectc.,.), the combination of these two things is very positive. It tells Google you are physically local to that area and cyber local to that area. All of this is good stuff for your ranking.

So go ahead and host your website with a local provider!