Q: Should I Get a 10 Gigabyte Colocation?

A: Most of our customers find our 10 Gigabyte Colocation connection best fills their needs for a growing office network or new Data Center Server Colocation. If your office is close to Fibernet infrastructure or fiber optic plant installs, such as is the case in many metro or urban areas, a colocation connection from Fibernet can provide the best speed and reliability to cost ratio of any Metro Area Network or Remote Colocation connection while cutting equipment costs and providing ease of implementation and configuration. We can host your dedicated servers, routers and other equipment in our Data Center. This provides you with dedicated air conditioning, UPS and generator power backup and access to specialized services and NOC staff on a 24 hour basis.

Colocation facilities use special rack mount enclosures for mounting servers and other network equipment. Please contact our sales office for information on what hardware you may need to install in our Data Center before you order servers or other network equipment. This will help us help you prevent costly ordering mistakes.

Q: How Is My 10 Gigabyte Colocation Usage Measured?

A: Each customer in our colocation Data Center is provisioned service on a separate originating switch port and VLAN (private network segment and broadcast domain) so we can accurately measure how much data is sent and received for that particular customer. Every 5 minutes statistics for that data transfer on each individual port is stored for each customer connection. That data is then tabulated and graphed in your Customer Login area of the customer back room at http://www.fiber.net. This allows us to tabulate at the end of the month your total transfer usage and create your invoice. If you go over your prepaid 10 Gigabyte transfer allowance, you incur a fee for the next usage segment (usually the next 10 gigabytes of total transfer). There is no penalty or administrative fee associated with this. Thus you simply pay for the total traffic you use according to the price schedule spelled out in your service agreement.

If you feel you need to increase your service agreement transfer allowance, our sales office can help you. They can even make the change retro active up to 1 full invoiced month. This can mean significant savings if you roll out new services and find you are suddenly serving many new customers and using more bandwidth. They can also help you determine if moving up to a Measured Speed type of colocation service is to your advantage. This is generally the case once you pass a total of about 25 Gigabytes transfer in a normal month.

The measurement and price schedule of your service agreement does not determine your connection speed or available bandwidth usage. Every customer is given a 10 megabit Ethernet port to start out. Once your normal transfer speed usage exceeds about half of the capacity of that port we can upgrade you at your request to a 100 megabit port. This is done in the management interface of our switch and generally is no cost to set this up. There is a monthly recurring fee of $100 for the port upgrade.If you need a Gigabit port we can provision that based on your needs, as well. Please ask your account rep for more information.

Q: How Much Rack Space Can I Get?

A: Each customer in our colocation Data Center is provisioned space based on the type of rack environment needed. All of our provided racks are enclosed, locking racks with front and rear doors for access. Some customers need a full rack of space for housing multiple servers and switches or other network equipment. We can accommodate these needs with no difficulty. We offer incentives for full or multi-rack leases. Some customers will only need to house one or two servers. In this case we offer enclosure space by the Rack Mount Unit or ‘U’. One ‘U’ is $29.95 a month and many servers can fit in just one ‘U’. Other common sizes for rack mount servers are 2 or 4 ‘U’ in height. A common PC tower is usually 4 ‘U’ tall when lying on its side. We can provision up to 48 ‘U’ for any one customer but once you pass about 20 to 24 ‘U’ of space it is more economical to get a whole rack.

We also offer colocation suites where you get your own private Data Center you which can be outfitted with racks however you see fit. We can provision the space for you or let you do it on your own. We can offer many levels and types of power delivery and customized cooling capacities. Please speak with our sales office for more info.

Q: What If My 10 Gigabyte Colocation Goes Down?

A: The most common cause for a colocation circuit to go down is either a power outage or line disruption. Check first that your Ethernet link and network equipment (switch or hub) are powered up and not showing errors. Many routers and some managed switches can tell you about the status of the Ethernet port and any problems it is experiencing. Check the cabling for the network cable to make sure it has not been damaged or disturbed. Make sure all connections are tight.

If you believe your equipment is working fine, please call Fibernet Technical Support for help. We can check the connection from our end and determine if the network is having a problem or if cabling needs repair.

If Fibernet is experiencing an outage due to maintenance we will have endeavored to notify you in advance. If you were not notified it is most likely because you are not signed up on our notification list. Please login to our customer back room at http://www.fiber.net and subscribe to the notification list for your service account type.

If Fibernet is experiencing an unscheduled outage due to a network issue, we will follow up with you once service is restored or once we have an ETA for repairs to be completed.

Q: What If My 10 Gigabyte Colocation Seems Slow?

A: The first thing you should check is your traffic graph in the customer back room at http://www.fiber.net. It will show you your current 5 minute average transfer. If it is unusually high, that can indicate possible virus or malware activity on your network or a user abusing your connection (downloading movies etc.).

If your usage seems depressed on the graph, this can still be caused by virus activity but it can be of a type that is hard to see from outside the network. We can come to your office and perform a network traffic scan to determine the nature of the traffic that is causing problems. Just call our sales and service office to arrange this service.

It is possible that your connection is experiencing transient errors or packet loss due to CRC errors on the Ethernet connection. This can often be seen in the router or switch interface for your end of the connection. We can determine this for you if you provide us authentication access to your equipment. We can also check our end of the connection for errors. This is usually fixed by testing and if needed, repairing the cabling to your colocation connection.

Incorrect speed or duplex settings on your network port can cause extreme speed problems. Often a duplex mismatch can make a 10 megabit Ethernet connection feel like a dial up connection. We can check for duplex mismatch errors on our end of the colocation connection if you notify us of the problem. It can often be fixed by changing settings on the involved network equipment.

It may be time to increase the capacity of your Ethernet colocation connection. Give our sales and service office a call and we will help you determine if it is time to upgrade your service.