Building Out a Server Room or Hosting Elsewhere

As a young company that is launching or moving locations, unexpected costs are thrown at you every day. Also as a young company, every cost is monitored closely. We wanted to profile a common cost that many businesses face as they expand or launch their business. Below are some key things to consider as you discuss having your companies’ server infrastructure within your space or outside it.

•   Some preliminary questions to ask yourself include:
o   Does your server room need to be separately cooled?
o   Would you be OK having your server in a hall closet?
o   Would you be OK having your sever in an equipment room?
o   Will you need to be adding servers over your lease period?
•   Do you have staff on hand who can deal with any issues that might arise
o   If you don’t have someone on staff all the time to manage this infrastructure, it probably makes sense to outsource the server hosting to a vendor who provides 24/7 customer support
•   Do you have 24/7 access to the building or does the building have Backup Power
o   Most building allow 24/7 access but things can go wrong if you can not access your space and server at night when an issue arises.
•   Is there a lot of remnant tech company space where server room infrastructure has been built out in the last 5 years that you can leverage?
o   Many technology-focused real estate markets have left over space from companies that have outgrown office space or gone out of business and this infrastructure is very valuable. If this can be found, there would be no need to build your own infrastructure but there is still increased electrical cost. Try and get the last companies electrical usage to get a rough figure of what it would cost to run your server or servers within the space
•   How long do you plan on being in this space
o   Are you going to be in your new space for long enough to justify installing back up power, separate cooling, or outside air
o   If you do move frequently, what type of disruption to your business will moving your server infrastructure cause?

At Rofo, we moved to different subleases 3 times over our first 24 months in operation and chose to outsource our server hosting. As we continue to grow and increase our server load and maintenance needs, we will continue to analyze our decision.

If you do decide to host your website elsewhere we can recommend Softlayer who’s pricing and support has been first class. For a free quote, please contact the Softlayer sales team below:
http://www.rofo.com/user/Softlayer

To find subleases with existing server room infrastructure, please search the Rofo system below:
http://www.rofo.com/

Last updated: 06.28.2010 10:15 AM

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