FastServers.Net Sets up Shop in Midwest

Philbert Shih, theWHIR.com

June 14, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- When PowerSurge (powersurge.com) first got into Web hosting in 1996 it focused squarely on the shared hosting segment of the market. It was not until 2001 that the company began offering dedicated servers, branding the new division Fastservers.Net (fastservers.net).

Met with better than expected response, the new offerings quickly became the focus of the company. "Fastservers.Net was by far the bulk of our revenue stream," says David McAnally, director or marketing for Fastservers.Net. "It was pulling in about three times the revenue we were getting off of shared."

About a year ago, the company began looking for someone to buy its shared hosting division so that it could concentrate exclusively on the dedicated hosting market. As March came to a close, a buyer was found. PowerSurge's shared hosting division was sold off to a group of investors that included Brian Lillie, president of PowerSurge, Iowa-based eCreative Group (ecreativegroup.com) and Chicago-based Web host Tantus Networks (tantusnetworks.com). The shared hosting division took the PowerSurge name with them, leaving Fastservers.Net to operate as an independent entity from its base in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Fastservers.Net has wasted little time in making changes it expects will help it capture a piece of the competitive dedicated server market. Just last month, Fastservers.Net announced that all server orders would now be placed in a new data center facility in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The company previously housed its approximately 2,000 dedicated servers in a Hurricane Electric (he.com) colocation facility in Fremont, California, even though the company has always been based in Iowa. Being able to access the connectivity and peering opportunities of the MAC West backbone, considered among the best in the world, was one of the main reasons the company chose Hurricane Electric back in 1997.

Fastservers.Net will occupy roughly 75 percent of the new 12,000 square foot facility, with the capacity to house up to 20,000 servers. The building, which was designed and built by Team Technologies (teamnet.net) in consultation with Fastservers.Net, is a two-story facility with the servers located on the first floor. The building includes redundant UPS systems, redundant Liebert air handles, FM-200 gas and VESDA fire protection, connectivity via DS3 Gig-E lines, 80 Amp server racks, smoke detection systems, switchgear and distribution buses up to the racks. The facility is closely monitored round the clock by on-site personnel and video surveillance. Security systems include card and biometric access control systems and proximity and motion sensors.

The company says one of the main reasons it moved to this Midwest data center facility was to take advantage of the unparalleled connectivity available through the facility's partnership with Internap (internap.com), an Atlanta-based bandwidth provider. Internap's intelligent routing software monitors and analyzes traffic on major Internet backbones in order to select optimal routes for customer data and communications. Once routes are found, traffic is redirected to the least congested available backbone, with traffic flowing along the fastest and most reliable route possible.

According to FastServers.Net, Iowa offers several other advantages over California. One of the most important benefits is the lower cost of doing business in the Midwest. Another is the stability of the power supplies. "The power out here in the Midwest is a lot more reliable than it is in California," says McAnally. California has well-documented issues with brownouts and blackouts, which are not much of an issue in Iowa.

"There is a layer of security too," says McAnally. "In this day and age with the terrorist situation, having a data center that is not in a very 'target-rich' area is definitely huge to us." And even if a terrorist should ever want to attack Iowa, however remote the possibility, it would be unlikely that the data center would be seen as a target since it's been made to look like a regular building. "There is nothing to suggest that it's a data center, so from the outside it's completely camouflaged," says McAnally.

The facility has also been engineered to withstand extreme weather conditions such as floods and tornadoes, which the Iowa area has been known to experience. Should extreme water-related issues ever arise, the facility not only resides on the highest point in town, says McAnally, but is rubber sealed from everything on the outside. "It could be submerged in water before anything happens."

While operations in Fremont will continue, McAnally says Fastservers.Net is migrating customers from the California facility to Iowa. For the most part, the move requests have been made based on the clear edge Iowa has in performance. According to McAnally, customers would "ask for an IP to ping and it would outperform from wherever they are."

Fastservers.Net is competing for a dedicated server market in a state of flux. But while companies like EV1Servers (ev1servers.net), ServerBeach (serverbeach.com), ValueWeb (valueweb.com) and others are dropping dedicated server price points below the $100 threshold, Fastservers.Net, with a bottom price of $128, does not intend to get caught up in the price war.

"One of the things we do not want to be is a bargain basement dedicated server provider," says McAnally. The company intends to do this by "competing on value," he says, avoiding charging bottom dollar prices by adding value through additional managed services.