The Ripple Effect of Colocation and IP Transit Rate Increases

A Customer and Vendor’s Response to Managing Rate Increases in the Market

December 16, 2008

Contributed by Brian Ussher, President and Co-Founder of iland Internet Solutions

Iland relies on a multitude of vendors for colocation and IP transit in order to maintain a variety of solutions for our customers including Hosted VMware solutions, colocation, dedicated servers and redundant IP transit solutions. We found that in this highly competitive marketplace, our vendors are constantly trying to manage their business more effectively and unfortunately this inadvertently affects our customers through rate increases, facility consolidation and network changes which often impacts end-users. Over the past year though to off-set these types of changes, we have finalized our own long-term data center footprints across the U.S. to establish more control over the components in our solution sets.  

Our business is always focused on working with the best suppliers of services in the most sought after markets.  With this in mind, we have the ability to leverage multiple relationships to ensure we remain competitively priced, even as markets continue to be constrained.  We have instituted a variety of ‘best-business’ practices to ensure our customers have options within our portfolio of locations and services to help them manage their business more effectively.  Here is how we do it:

-          Because of the trends in the data center market and space/power constraints Iland has built a highly redundant VMware Hosted Cloud Services architecture to bring our client base new options to traditional colocation.  We know that colocation is an important component in IT infrastructure, but based on customer demand we can now provide alternatives to either replace traditional colocation or offer a combination of virtualized cloud services along with colocation.  In this way we always bring new technologies into our solutions—leveraging the best options within each.  Virtualization solves many of the data center issues we hear from the marketplace – decreases traditional colocation space and power costs; provides predictable IT costs; and allows clients to enjoy the many other benefits of virtualization.  Our team of experts can guide you to a cost-effective solution leveraging our VMware platform.

-          We are constantly sourcing alternative and varied providers whom we can enter into long-term contracts with; within the key markets we provide services.  This will ensure that we can remain competitive while providing our customers with robust and diverse hosting environments that they are confident about

-          Our IP transit solutions are as diverse as our locations.  We source multiple providers in each location to ensure redundancy and diversity is offered coupled with the most competitive rates available.  By doing this, we provide our customers with options that very few providers offer in this marketplace.

-          We are highly flexible, agile and provide a variety of solutions that can help solve difficult problems and provide cost-saving measures for a multitude of companies deploying next-generation technology.

Where we can control our ability to offer competitive solutions in a market, we will.  However, there are always factors that constrain all businesses in this space, such as power.  Power pricing is mandated by the power municipalities and unfortunately as demand increases, so do our rates – and this applies to all businesses requiring colocation and data center facility services. 

We do what we can to manage costs, not only for our own business but to ensure our customers get the best value for the services they require.  To find out more about how we can help your business respond to market changes in pricing and positioning more effectively, please contact us – that’s why we’re here.