Can anyone give me a quote on how much it will cost to start my own small datacenter?

Hey guys, I just wanted to know how much do you think it will cost to start my own small datacenter. Probably only the size of 3 home garages. I probably wanna start my own webhosting business or just host a huge site.

 

Expensive! ...well I suppose that depends on how much money you've got to throw around. If I had some real estate I might consider setting up from scratch myself but I think I'd prefer to go the co-location route where you rent space in an existing datacenter.

You've got to think about the building infrastructure, 3-phase power, cooling, fire regulations, IP trunks, failover, offsite redundancy... all very complicated and expensive stuff... I'm sure that it would be in the millions of dollars bracket to get off the ground...

 

I wanted to start one off shore. Maybe somewhere in asia. I think real estate is alot cheaper their.

 

Real estate would be the cheapest part of starting a DC...

 

You want something serious; then read above; I wouldn't advise it. However;

I have a large part of operations in my house; 4 racks with servers and equipment to run it. I don't live in warm surroundings; cooling is not a problem. For me the costs are power + bandwidth. We get 20mbit DSL to our door for 'nothing' ($30/month) here; i multiple of those, which cost a bit more to get hooked but still; I have > 100 mbit for a lot price. And it's stable. And because everything is 'next to my bed' my customers get the fixin' speed of a huge company; I can change hds/reset servers/check stuff faster than those big ones can walk up to a rack and check.
My servers at home have a (much) higher uptime than my servers at the hosters I run at.

But it all depends on what you want... You won't sleep much if you have this kind of operation with 3 garages full

If you are looking for (much) more profi; why not rent a cage at a provider; that is like your own garagebox, but professional. I didn't as this is *much* cheaper for me

 

Wow. Since your hardware is in your house, won't you run into some legal issues such as fire safety and not to mention the neighbors. lol

my plan was to go travel somewhere in asia, buy a small space. Probably a building as big as a 3 bedroom house in america, and host my hardware their. I know that asia is a little more tolerant with these kinds of things.

 

i think Europe is more tolerant too, your plan is strange , to go in Asia only for this ? i think is a little too much, better invest the money where you live or close

 

Well, labor in asia is super cheap. You can pay someone 5 dollars a day while in america you pay them 8.25 an hour. The minimum wage. I'm not saying its a good thing, but its just to start a business off.

 

"5 dollars a day" to someone who can work with that datacentre ? no way

 

In Eastern Europe ... minimum from 300 $ to 500 $ / month for Hungary , Romania , Slovakia e.t.c as full job , less in Moldova or Ukraina.

space is very expensive : for 50mp you must pay more than 50.000 euros in a big city ( just an example ) and this 50mp is an apartment , you can rent it for around 200 euros / month or more

food is the most expensive and taxes

 

its true you can have cheap real estate in asia but do you have this in your mind that in Asia, will you get that amount of internet Speed for your Data Center?

 

good question ...

 

Less in Moldova, but not in Ukraine

 

for general questions, I can give out some numbers
- for starting: with facility for 20 racks, at least 2M usd
- monthly fee: it depends on the bandwidth and cooling, staff, it's around 200K - 400K usd

If you can afford it, why not The above quote was valid 6 months ago, when I worked with APC staff about their datacenter solution

 

Fire safety rules are for your protection. Moving somewhere with lax regulations and then taking advantage of them just means more risk for you.

There are only a few places in Asia where you can get internet connectivity on par with what you can get under any rock in the USA. Primarily Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea. To some degree Singapore. And guess what? Real estate is not cheap in those places. My friends own a studio apartment in a battered old building in Hong Kong that they rent out for over US$2500/month. I was staying there a few weeks ago after the previous tenant moved out (who would turn down a free apartment in Hong Kong?), and there was a steady flow of interested prospective tenants, bidding up the price and wanting to take it on the spot. Nice gigabit broadband though. 1000mbps - suck on that, FIOS!

Here in Malaysia rent and labour are cheap but you cannot get decent international internet connectivity at any price. Anyone with serious hosting needs goes offshore, quite often to the USA. People only host in Malaysia when their audience is exclusively Malaysian.

In my job I have been to almost every Asian country and had to deal with internet infrastructure and providers each time. There is no place in the region I would prefer vs US and Europe for hosting unless I was targeting Asian customers. The balance of price vs infrastructure vs regulatory hassle just doesn't work out.

You should also remember that depending on where you are in Asia (other than far west Asia, like Anatolian Turkey and the middle east) the mininum latency to US and Europe is typically 200-300ms. This rules out or seriously degrades services like VoIP and online gaming.