Frequently asked questions about Colocation

What is colocation?
Colocation (or colo) means that, instead of keeping your servers on site, you move them to a professionally run data center with top-quality cooling, power, bandwidth, and security. Exactly like the one Cruzio has built in downtown Santa Cruz! Your servers will be safer and happier being in a home built specifically for them. Best of all, you can visit them in their natural habitat anytime and if you ever need assistance, Cruzio staff can always lend a hand during our business hours.

How will my servers be connected to the internet?
Cruzio’s fully-redundant, self-healing network connects via 10 Gbps of fiber internet to multiple tier 1 providers in San Jose with extensive national and international peering relationships to ensure that your data will arrive via the shortest possible routes. Your servers will be connected to that fiber on a 100 Mbps port or, if you have the need for speed, you can get a Gigabit connection.

How much bandwidth can I use?
Bandwidth is burstable to 100 or 1000 Mbps depending on connection, we use 95th percentile billing (see below) and 5 Mbps of commit bandwidth per month is included with all our colo products. To give you an idea of what that means in practical terms, if you had a website with an average Web page size of about 50 kilobytes, and it was constantly serving 2 to 3 Web pages per second around the clock, that website would be doing approximately 1 Mbps of traffic per month. If you need more, our bandwidth rates are the lowest around, guaranteed. Don’t worry, we don’t ding you with massive fees if you get Slashdotted!

What is 95th percentile bandwidth billing?
95th percentile billing is a common way to bill for bandwidth use on high speed connections. Cruzio measures the bandwidth use on a connection every 5 minutes each calendar month and throws out the top 5%. The highest usage remaining is the commit bandwidth tier we bill at. This allows Cruzio to manage traffic on our network and give you the best possible high-speed connection, while only paying for actual usage. That 5% we throw out equals about 36 hours per month that you can do whatever you like with! We think this is fairer than billing for bandwidth you don’t need all the time, or billing for total transferred data.

What about IP addresses?
We provide a /30 (one usable IP) with all colo services. This allows us to provision additional IPs to you on a different block in the future, without any need on your part to renumber your existing systems. It also keeps things cleaner in our router. Additional blocks can be added at reasonable rates. An IP justification form is required. Cruzio also accommodates IPv6 internet by tunneling over existing IPv4 connections.

How do I get in to work on my servers?
Cruzio provides 24/7/365 unescorted key card access into the data center. That’s right, some people like to celebrate the New Year with their servers, and they are able to (but please no food or drink in the data center.)

What about security? How do I know my servers are safe?
Our data center is protected by state-of-the-art security systems, RFID card access, and multiple video cameras monitoring 24/7. All our 1/3, 1/2, and full cabinets are self-contained and locking and we don’t allow unauthorized persons in the data center at any time. To ease your fears, onsite and offsite backup servers are kept physically secure, and backed-up data is protected using heavy encryption to ensure that unauthorized copies are useless and virtually impossible to decode.

What kind of backup power do you have?
Not one but two 150 kW EPA Tier 3 emissions-compliant generators. Each tank holds enough diesel to run for several days before refueling, so needless to say, we have the power! We also have an 80 kW UPS for the few-second cutover period between when electricity goes out (in an earthquake, for example) and the generator kicks on (which is automatic). There’s no downtime, not even a few seconds.

What kind of air conditioning do you use?
A high-efficiency Computer Room Air Conditioning unit. The acronym is (you guessed it) CRAC.

Have you thought about natural disasters? This is Santa Cruz after all.
Let’s just say that if there were a Zombie Apocalypse, we would want to hide in our Data Center (if we weren’t more terrified of our head engineer than we were of zombies!) To prove it to you: the racks are secured at the top and the bottom for additional stability. We’ve also installed a state-of-the-art DuPont FM200 waterless, clean-agent fire suppression system.

How much power is installed to each rack?
As a default, every rack will have 20 Amps of power. And our overhead bus system means that dropping in extra power is a snap. Maximum 40 Amps per cabinet.