Colocation outside of Manchester in the north west?

mikeysoft · 6th December 2007

Anyone know of any datacentres offering colocation in the north west of England outside of Manchester? Liverpool? Warrington? Chester? M56/M62 corridor?

If none outside of Manchester, who are the cheapest in Manchester for small amounts of rack space? When I've factored in extra IPs, KVM IP, etc Melbourne look a bit pricey. Anyone know of any companies offering small amounts of U in that new datacentre in Wythenshawe, TeleData (is it relatively new?). (they don't seem to offer small amounts of U directly themselves).

I'd be most happy with a smaller datacentre outside of Manchester with *reasonable* connectivity.

Cheers
Mike

Cranky · 6th December 2007

Melbourne are a good quality provider, their pricing is set accordingly. There are many providers offering colo in Melbourne and IFL, I'm not (yet, as I've been away for so long) aware of any providers offering colo in Teledata as they're quite a new facility but I'm sure there's some around. For pricing you're likely to get good service vs price from providers in one of the above facilities, but poorer pricing and/or reliability and/or redundancy outside of Manchester.

danfoster · 6th December 2007

I know I'm biased but I don't know of any decent colo providers who operate any cheaper than us. As we have our own facility, our rackspace costs are lower than most DC resellers, so knowing the margins for base colo I can't see how it can be done any cheaper!

Not sure about whether Teledata has people selling per-U colo but maybe give Jay @ Teledata a shout and he'll point you in the right direction. Knowing the price of their cabs, i'd be amazed if anyone could undercut us there though (i'm not saying teledata is expensive, pricing is pretty average for anywhere these days)

mikeysoft · 6th December 2007

Sorry Dan didn't really mean Melbourne are pricey as such, meant by the time I'd spec'd up a 1U with all the nice extras, it came out more than I really wanted to pay (KVM IP, shared firewall, etc.). I'm new to this so probably want all the nice extras for comfort!

Can't fault Melbourne's website, it gives very detailed and full info on what is offered with the service and the 'extras', stuff which other websites perhaps often assume people know (which many will, but not if they are a newbie like me) or aren't bold enough to state/price up front. This means you can determine the all-in price up front on Melbourne's website, perhaps making other places look cheaper as they don't always detail the 'nice extras' I mentioned earlier.

Anyway, I'm still curious to know if places like Liverpool, Warrington and Chester have DCs offering colo. I'm all for 'spreading things around', even if it's at a slight cost in terms of transit price & risk. We don't want another London in Manchester ;-) Would be great to see one of the Manchester DCs opening a site in say Warrington (not that far). Costly I know... There's always the secret Cheshire nuclear bunker! ;-)

Mike

danfoster · 6th December 2007

Yes it can get expensive when you add the extras! We have people paying 10 times the base colo price once the full set of extras have been added on!

Thanks for the compliment about our site, we do try to explain everything, but it's almost impossible with colo as there are so many options.

The only place I know outside of Manchester but in the same area is the C2 Bunker in Nantwich which I'm assuming you're referring to, not sure what their pricing is like though. The smaller/out of the city places tend to be more £ in my experience, as their transit costs / economies of scale are higher.

Karl · 7th December 2007

Ohhh, might have to go visit them when I take my car to be serviced, didn't realise they were in Nantwich.

Extras - They're bound to cost more, they cost more to provide, simple economics really. When a decent KVM setup can cost £10k+ for 250 ish servers, it has to be paid for somehow.

nukeproofhostin · 10th December 2007

It's a great day out, bunker is allso a museam! And of course the sign for "secret bunker - left" allways amuses me. : )

I have a rack in the bunker, despite the M6 Toll it's worked out really well for me. We started up in the bunker and are just taking out rackspace in BlueSquare . Allthough we are sticking a BladeCenter into the bunker as it has all the remote KVM ( including boot mount media ) and power built in with redundancy in the chassis.

Let me know if you would like any more info on the bunker, it's perhaps the smallest DC of them all. Some details up on my site for the bunker.

Cheers, Jim

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