Let me answer it all one at a time!
Firstly this post was needed before the announcement we are mass mailing here soon, as it is going to be a core part of the announcement
Timeframe, is the other part, we are working to make an app to display all that as we speak. It will be available on status.jodohost.com soon (as in when DNS is ready and we get the pointer for apache to serve the app that is in a directory right now)
Why is Waco better? We’ll get into that more detail as things go along, but we knew last year it was time to start looking elsewhere when things changed at CRG Miami exchange, and they renamed CoreSite and started to go public(as in IPO).
As part of their SEC EDGAR filings this was a paragraph:
One of the biggest draws for investors in this latest data-center REIT is CoreSite’s predictions about its ability to raise lease prices. In its prospectus, the company said it believes its average rental rates are “substantially” below market levels and that it could boost cash flow by raising them as leases expire. The company renewed about 75% of its leases that expired during 2009, and the dollar-weighted average rate per square foot for renewals or new leases rose more than 25% that year. In the first half of 2010, renewals and new leases rose another 25%.
The company said many of its leases scheduled to expire during 2010 are rented at rates “meaningfully” below current market rates, giving it more room to raise rates in the future.
I think this is pretty self explanatory as to why we had to seek other options, the margins are low in hosting and trying to sustain a 25% increase each renewal, and them embedding year over year increases already, is simply unsustainable for growth.
Within the last year I have toured locations in multiple states. We looked into both North Carolina and Oregon, which interestingly facebook decided to build on sites where I had looked! Waco compared favorably to them and didn’t have the buildout costs we’d have required in these locations as we found a ready facility with all that we needed, and good growth potential in the area.
We’ve learned a lot through this search and won’t rule out future sub-locations, but for now we have invested in this local market with offices, and will be working to strengthen our business through added markets in the US as well. Waco will be our ‘home’ and our base of operations for a long time to come.
Yes Waco is also about 150 miles from my home, and I am working to sell my home and move here as well, so travel time is much better on me, and we have local staff already hired (and in training) here in Waco now too.
Let me now address plan changes, yes all will be upgraded, CL1 and CL2. We are going to be announcing further details on this but we are also having our own direct ARIN allocation now, and will be working to get more before ipv4 is exhausted as well. IP justification will undoubtedly be stricter in the coming weeks with us, and really for the internet as a whole as well. in addition all servers will be redeployed in elastic cloud instances, I explained this a bit to antic here:
http://support.jodohost.com/showthread.php?t=21799
Adding some more:
This was not without extensive levels of testing, with a few exceptions, in florida and some deep south american locations, the performance was better to much better here in Texas(and Waco), than in Miami as well. Add to this the fact that weather events are less of a risk here, sure they still happen (tornado) but much less widespread and not a near yearly event. Also in addition to this it gave us the chance to redesign how the network is laid out and address some issues going forward such as VPS servers and other dedicated solutions.
