Which co-location providers would you recommend in the US?

The biggest factor here is location, you can have unlimited choice if you’re in or near a major market (New York, Chicago, LA, etc), which you didn’t mention. If you’re in smaller markets, often times the larger providers still have some sort of presence but prices will be out of control. I would probably find a local managed service provider and see if they have any rack-level offerings, before going with the behemoths like Equinix or Digital Realty because they will bleed you dry if you’re not careful.

I have used Deft, Cyxtera and a handful of smaller providers in the past (and of course Eqx and DLR), but those met a particular project’s needs well and may or may not fit yours.

Where would you prefer to have this set up? What are your growth plans, if any? Will you be looking to grow into other PoPs as your product gains traction? Do you need access to a more diverse mix of transit providers? Are you bringing your own addresses? Are you looking for concierge-/fully-managed level service or are you going to manage all the aspects of the hardware yourself? Lots of questions to get to the bottom to before an ideal provider could be found.

A shortcut is to pick one from this list: https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/locations/

If AWS is a customer, you can trust that it's a good well-connected facility, and you have the option of a cheap low-latency direct fiber connection to AWS within the same data center should you ever need it. You'll have your pick of Internet carriers in any of these carrier-neutral facilities. Ask the colocation facility to recommend a local contractor for your installation work and use their Remote Hands service for small maintenance work.

Without knowing where you are, it's hard to say. But things to look out for: What is included in the monthly fee? Is power extra? What about a second power strip for the backup power supplies? Is network included? How much? Often they charge per network port connection, in which case how fat is each connection? Is it billed by 95th percentile or raw bits (you want 95th percentile)? Are there access fees (some places charge you every time you enter the facility)?

What is their connectivity? Which Tier 1 providers are they directly connected to? What is the total bandwidth connected to the datacenter? Do they have direct connects to other providers? Direct connects to AWS/Azure/GCP?

I'd build a spreadsheet with the answers to all of these questions. Color the cells green/yellow/red based on how you feel about the answers.

You won't be able to compare directly between them but it should give you a good idea.

It's tough. I had an excellent colo provider that gave a nice discount because of all the open source stuff my servers do, that didn't have me go through layers of trained monkeys to communicate with someone technical, that communicated well through email rather than through billing. Unfortunately, they closed very recently and I'm just now looking for a new home for that collection of servers.

Another colo I wish I could still recommend is Turnkey Internet (http://www.turnkeyinternet.com). They were a smaller facility - quite literally - where everyone was friendly and personable, with no fuss, no issues, and very good pricing. They've now been bought by ColoHouse, and I have no idea how that will affect things there.

If the acquisition hasn't changed the people and practices in their Latham, NY facility, then I'd recommend them.

I'm interested to check out some of the recommendations here for my own machines :)

On another note, it is interesting to see how many people go out of their way to try to discourage colocation in favor of renting / using service providers. I've always believed that movement to be successful marketing, both to make money for the large providers, and if you're the conspiratorial type, perhaps to make as much data as possible accessible to government TLA agencies. But why do people think it's OK to answer someone's question with, "don't do that, because I have an opinion about something I've never done"? Hmmm...

What are your goals?

If budget is a factor, there are local/regional providers you can find good deals with. E.g. I've had good experiences with https://www.opticfusion.com/ in Seattle.

If low-latency across the US is a factor then...doing that with one will be sub-optimal, however I'd either start in a specific market you want to chase (e.g. LA or NYC), or go more central like Chicago.

If connectivity flexibility and peering are key for you then you might consider locating in a "carrier hotel". The best locations for those vary by geography (e.g. in Chicago that would be at Equinix, but in LA it's Coresite). You'll pay more, but can readily access the peering exchange.

Thank you for all your recommendations. Latency is not a concern because we will use that rack to store logs, metics and other telemetry data for our customers.

I believe major concern is power + bandwidth and good support because we wont be able to drive / fly there at moments notice.

I highly just recommending renting machines. Hetzner or OVH are low cost providers. There is very little reason to have to buy your own machine and do the co-location thing.

If you need more machines, put them in any office that has a fiber connection, like it is cheap to get a 3Gbps connection these days. Do more than one location if you need some of them online. In different cities if needed. Basically you want to avoid being in the same weather location/powergrid connection.

I've done this before and it works really well to cut costs.

Don't fall for the HE $400/mo rack deal is my advice.

Flexential is near us and other major markets. I know our local one just did their monthly UPS battery and generator test. Benefit to Flex is that they have interconnects to their nearby DCs and use Megaport for connecting to Cloud providers. They have a lot of various options and for us their rack pricing was pretty good.

Knowing the region here would help as a lot of them are region specific, but I've had great experiences with Tierpoint (https://www.tierpoint.com).

Out here in Data Center Alley, AKA Ashburn VA, Raging Wire is a large and reliable player in co-location hosting.

https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/site-selection/article/11...

Raging Wire is pretty open about their co-location business, and even has big advertisement signs placed outside their data centers advertising to new customers.

I would think you would be first thinking about location (it's a big country).

We use https://www.edgeconnex.com/ (originally meer.net, then SVColo, before the EdgeConnex acquisition) with transit from Wave (was Layer42, was meer.net). Looking at their current web site though I'm not sure if they are marketing single rack colo now. Possibly we're grandfathered in.

I would have suggested Flexential until they had a major outage recently.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cloudflare-claims...

Well, piggy backing on this, if anyone has recommendations of providers in Los Angeles, CA I'm all ears.

Assuming I'll need to go with a reseller because I need a half rack. Redundant 20A circuits would be nice, but not required.

I don’t have personal experience with Deft, but the folks at Basecamp/37signals/HEY wrote an article about their move off the cloud, using Deft as their colo provider: https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb

There is a very deep rabbit hole you can go down with the webhostingtalk.com forums, which have a lot of options and deep history and conversation on this subject.

Do you have any location preferences? What are your requirements for power, network, and remote hands support?

Wholesaleinternet.com may have a good deal, but I would ask about whatever remote hands services they offer.

Psychz.net (DFW)

FiberHub.

Colocate to what? Lol.

opencolo.com