Review Data393.com – Data center and dedicated servers
Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to visit the Data393.com data center located in the southern area of the DTC (Denver Technology Center) in Denver, Colorado. The facility is located near Interstate 25 and easy to find. Data393 is the result of buying/merging a couple of local hosting companies and by building services out of owned buildings with already integrated data center pieces. Data393.com is located in 2 buildings and has several smaller data centers on different floors of both buildings. One of the buildings is the former Cable & Wireless Data Center back from the big Dot Com Bubble days.
Security is high and not customer has access to the data center without being accompanied by Data393 personnel. Access cards, hand scanners, and a lot of other security related features are in place.
Data393 has some larger customers either occupying an entire cage or mini-data center room within the facilities as well as many other customers leasing rack space or entire racks. Single server space, 1/3 of cabinets, all the way up to a full cage are common requested packages.
Quote:
As a premier provider of Colocation, Dedicated Servers and Managed Services, Data393 offers an array of services designed to more effectively manage IT infrastructures. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado our state of the art data center environment enables Data393 to offer your business enterprise level colocation and hosted solutions. End Quote
Unlike many other providers Data393.com has only limited information on their website about choosing a dedicated server from their services. Prices start at $249.00, but except for 2 or 3 additional pieces of information a customer has to either call or request a call back from the sales department. Comparing this to some other players in the dedicated server market, this is clearly a limitation when looking for a place to get a dedicated server. I inquired about 1/3 of a rack for my personal business needs and found the quoted price at the upper end of the US market. $399.00 per month with very limited bandwidth and power associated – there are much better offers available somewhere else.
However – the strength of Data393 seems to be customized services for local business partners. Data393 is clearly not really participating in the US market and is not competing with places like Theplanet.com, EV1 servers, GNAX, or HE.net. Another indicator for this is the missing availability of well-known software for the mass hosting market like cPanel. If you want to host with Data393.com, you will need to bring your own license. Another piece you need to bring is network equipment. By default no switches or routers of any kind are supplied as part of the service. For bigger players this is not an issue at all, but for a small host moving into their first own rack for colocation it can mean the additional expense.
Overall I was very impressed with Data393.com facilities and customer service. Unfortunately for me the high-end prices and the low end supply of bandwidth and features was not a good match. With different needs however, I would certainly consider Data393.com as they seem to offer great service and facilities.
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