Fresh out of HS, am looking to start up a hosting company with a couple of my friends. We are still in the feasibility study of the business and would like to have some inputs on whether it is best to put up our own DC or rent space to house our servers.
1. Do DCs in Toronto offer teired pricing? 1,2,3or maybe 5 year pricing?
2. How is power being charged? kW, amps etc?
3. Who among the providers are best suited for start ups?
At the moment we are still developing the feasibility study on the business which the banks will need if they are to lend us money
Another question I have to add is, does location matter vs. pricing? would DCs in the downtown core be more expensive than that of outside the city, let say markham, mississauga?
Due to the competition levels in the market, you will need to differentiate yourselves with something relatively unique - your killer selling point.
From a personal perspective, you are entering a very saturated market with a lot of good and an even greater number of bad hosts. I would say that in your initial period while building up the business, that you want to keep your capex and opex as low as possible (duh!) while you build your customer base. You may be best off starting with a dedicated server or two for your initial deployments. That way you don't have to worry about the hardware breaking at 0300 and having to rush down to the DC to fix it, after you've had to keep spares stocked on site etc..etc..
If you are after a local Canadian provider, I believe Peer1 are Toronto based (I could be mistaken).
As Schumie suggested you are entering into the new market. When you build a house you should need strong base. Same thing in the business, when you building a new business, you need to have strong base. There are many competitors in the market and you need to come up with some of your innovative ideas. Always go with reputable data center. Once you are in the business, you know to choose to the right data center.
__________________ WebHostingChat ( Web Hosting Forum) DatacenterSearch (Find your Datacenter) YOU FAIL ONLY WHEN YOU FAIL TO TRY
Peer1 is pretty large in the region if you're looking for a more corporate provider as well, I'm sure you'll hear their name a lot the more you look around there.
From my limited experience with Peer1, their prices are very high comparing to others located in the same area. So I doubt whether its really good for a start-up company in terms of cost, however they use the major internet backbones like Level3.