Preferred Data Center Locations?
 

Does it matter where the Data Center is housed? For example, would an area in the city be preferred to an area in a more rural part of the state? I know that one can't be too picky in terms of where to house their computers- whatever building could contain that many servers, but I'd think that a more rural location would be preferred as it would give the data center more space to grow should the number of customers exceed the amount of servers initially placed in the building.

If physical security isn't too much of a concern then the closer you are to public works the better.

Data centers are peppered all throughout the greater Washington D.C. area. Most of them are located within a few miles of general population. A couple of the main considerations is access to network backbones and access to multiple power sources. Some data centers made the mistake of building too far off the ranch and found that they could only get a single non-redundant utility feed for power, or that access to carrier backbones were limited because of their physical location. As a result they either have spend a heaps of money to get those services to their facility or just do without.

For example there was one company I worked for that decided to build their data center in an industrial park that only had one single sub station feed for electricity. Later they inquired about what it would cost to get a second, unique, feed and quickly bawked and decided it wasn't worth the 2 million dollar price that was quoted to get it done.

There are business that even have data centers in high rise buildings. Some banks used to do that between the 80's and early 2000's.

You generally want them near power substations and near fiber backbones. Putting them where power is not easily run and where fiber is not present presents some major problems for having to add in fiber paths.