Speaking of Mac Mini Colo
(This is an article about a company that impressed me. I’m not a customer of theirs, although I’ve considered it and will if circumstances permit. Perhaps more importantly, let me make it clear they aren’t a “sponsor” of this post -- which is to say that they haven’t paid me to say any of this. I just wanted to share it because stories about companies that impress are at least -- if not more -- important to share than companies which disappoint and frustrate.)
{A Brief Definition for Non-GNerds who Have No Reason to Know It Except That I’m Going To Talk About It: A “Colocation” (or “colo” for short) is a business which provides a place for you to put a computer server as part of their infrastructure: they provide the internet connectivity, A/C power, temperature control, etc. It’s the sort of thing that big businesses do when they want to own their own servers, and the sort of thing that small business and nerds do when they want to have a computer that they own but which sits somewhere behind a nice, big Internet connection and in a proper sort of facility.}
At 11:14 p.m. (US/Eastern) on Christmas Day, I noticed that a Mac developer’s website was down, and so I mentioned it to him on Twitter:
@wilshipley Delicious-Monster•com is down according to http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ (as well as my own attempts to access it.)
Three minutes later, Brian Stucki -- the guy who runs Mac Mini Colo {a ‘colo’ that uses (surprise!) Mac Minis} -- replied:
@tjluoma @wilshipley saw this tweet so I went ahead and restarted it. Fixed.
Mac Mini Colo is located in Las Vegas, so this was 8:15 p.m. (local time) on Christmas day.
I’ll admit that part of this was coincidence: Brian follows me and Wil on Twitter, so he saw my message. He knew Wil’s site was on Mac Mini Colo. He knew that he could fix the problem by rebooting the server. So he did. Coincidence. No argument.
But here’s the thing: if your website was hosted on Mac Mini Colo and you had a problem at 11 p.m. on Christmas day, sure, he might not have heard about it on Twitter, but I’m willing to bet that if you’d sent some sort of a support request, he would have responded every bit as fast.
I host most of my non-Tumblr sites on Dreamhost (a shared hosting account that’s too cheap to give up, even though it isn’t great) or Squarespace - a premium hosting company where I pay as much each month per site as I do for my entire hosting account at Dreamhost. Both are big companies. If I had sent a support request to Squarespace on Christmas telling them my site was down, it probably would have been fixed within an hour or so. If I’d sent a similar request to Dreamhost, it probably would have been fixed… well… sometime in the next day, maybe less.
(If my Tumblr had gone down on Christmas, well, let’s just say I wouldn’t have been holding my breath to see how long it would take to come back online.}
Probably most of you aren’t looking for a colocation site. But maybe one or two of you are. If so, here’s a suggestion that you take a look at Mac Mini Colo.
p.s. — to all the gnerds out there who are dying to tell me that it’s “Mac mini” not “Mac Mini” -- I am aware that is how Apple capitalizes it. I find it displeasing to the eye.
p.p.s — I thought I had shared this before, but now I can’t find it, so allow me to explain: “gnerd” is my term to reference those who might otherwise be referred to as “geeks” or “nerds” in the computer realm, avoiding choosing either term and instead preferring a word which says: “No one cares, you know what I mean.” Likewise, “Non-GNerds” is how I choose to identify those who are not in that category. I have previously been in the habit of referring to them as “Normals,” however, Dr. Drang recently mentioned that he often hears “Normal” used by gnerds as a way to sound like they are putting themselves down, but they’re actually using it as a subtle put-down of the others. He’s probably right. That hasn’t been my intention when I’ve used it. I use it to mean “people who aren’t afflicted with the often inconvenient inclinations which drive gnerds to spend an inordinate amount of time with their bits of nerdy.“ I wouldn’t mind having fewer of those inclinations myself.
