Non-US based hosting?

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 10:43:55AM -0500, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:

>My company does shared hosting and offers Xen virtual servers (*) and 
>all our servers are at a collocation facility right here in Toronto. 

You forgot a URI to plug your company - since that's what I'm
specifically looking for you needn't be shy.

>We're conditioned to expect prices of computers and associated 
>technologies to always go down but the capital costs of servers 
>constitute a decreasing proportion of the overall costs. Collocation 
>pricing has been firm and, in fact, has gone up in the last couple of 
>years. The owners of the colo facility in which we have our servers 
>tell me that electrical power is one of the fastest growing costs for 
>them and that it constitutes a significant portion of their costs. 
>You may be surprised to find out how much an extra 15A circuit costs. 
>With a 42U rack, typically, you get one 15A circuit, which is not 
>enough to power 42 1U servers, assuming you could even put 42 1U 
>servers in that rack due to heat load. (An extra 15A circuit will 
>cost you $250 per month.) All that equipment has to be kept cool by 
>chilling units and there has to be reliable power, which means 
>keeping battery backup units and diesel generators at the ready. I 
>wouldn't be surprised if two out of every three kW of power is 
>consumed by things other than the servers in a typical colo facility.

That's a good point, and interesting.

>> You can also block those pesky law enforcement types with iptables
>> (on your virtual machine of course) and a blocklist from
>> bluetack.co.uk ( http://tinyurl.com/yc49ug for a full list of
>> bluetack's blocklists ).
>
>Any party who is determined to get to your site can do so through a 
>proxy so such a scheme is nothing more than a placebo.

Exactly, and I don't imagine that I could prevent an interested party
from snooping on unencrypted web traffic.

>All of our servers are right here in Toronto but I still wouldn't make 
>any guarantees that they would be beyond the reach of authorities 
>anywhere. In fact, my working assumption is that spy agencies can 
>monitor any electronic communications they want at any time. We've 
>never been approached by the authorities for anything but my response 
>if approached would be, "We will comply with any request that is 
>backed up by an order from a court with jurisdiction in the Province 
>of Ontario." 

This is exactly the protection I am looking for - for the request to
route through the Canadian courts, rather than be subject to warrantless
search and seizure.  If the US "law" enforcement would seek FISA
warrants I would be perfectly happy, but since the US government has
rejected the rule of law I will not support US business for my
technology choices.
-- 

yours,

William

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