By: Steve Eschweiler
Over the years, as our operation has grown, we have toured most of the data centers in the greater Tampa Bay area. After all, we started out 11 years ago as a shared hosting company. Only when our customer’s needs for resources grew did we start offering dedicated servers and only then did we have a need for a large data center. During our emergence as a premier dedicated server provider we shopped many of the Tampa data centers looking for options to house our ever-growing number of server racks. As you know, we eventually acquired our own Tampa data center. However, we only arrived at our final destination after a long journey. That journey is what helped us see what the rest of the Tampa data centers were doing wrong and what helped lead us to create the best data center with the best network in Tampa.
If you happen to be shopping for Tampa colocation options you will see there are a few options. Each of which seems good at first glance. However, once you dig a little you will see Hivelocity stands out as the one best option. There is a reason we have customers in over 130 countries around the world. There is a reason Hivelocity was the only data center named to the Tampa Bay Business Journals list of fastest growing companies in Tampa. That reason is our network provides incredible speeds across the globe.
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- If your site takes longer than 2 seconds to load you may be losing 40% of your visitors.
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- Over 50% of online shoppers consider a site’s speed when determining which sites they are loyal to.
Every customer at Hivelocity is provided with a premium blend of our 6 transit providers; Level 3, Time Warner Telecom, Global Crossing, GTT, Comcast and CogentCo. We connect to each of these providers via 10Gbps fiber. We enhance our network to ensure every packet of data travels over the absolute best path with a product called Noction Inteligent Routing Platform. Our Inteligent Routing knows when BGP is not providing the fastest path for data to travel and intelligently chooses a better path…the best path. As a matter of fact, we improve roughly 30% of the routing paths on our network every day with our Intelligent Routing Platform. Another way to say it is, anyone relying solely on BGP (if they had the same 5 carriers as Hivelocity) would be providing a slower network to 30% of the requests on the network (customers and people trying to reach those customer’s online presence).
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- No other Tampa data center provides the same premium blend of 5 transit providers.
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- Several of the Tampa data centers are single-homed, meaning they provide you with 1 transit provider and they overcharge for it.
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- Most of the Tampa data centers do not have 10Gbps fiber connections to their transit but much smaller 1Gbps connections
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- I know of no other Tampa data center utilizing Intelligent Routing Protocol.
Sadly for the other Tampa data centers, I am not done listing the reasons the Hivelocity network outperforms them. Hivelocity has created private peering routes in Los Angelas, Dallas, Atlanta and Seattle (Miami, New York & Chicago coming soon). These private peering paths greatly improve the network results for anyone utilizing any of the several hundred carriers in those metro areas. With our private peering we have offloaded well over 1Gbps of transit from our core network. In layman terms, over 1Gbps of our network’s traffic enjoyed and even further improvement on the Hivelocity Network due to our peering. Over 1Gbps improved…..that is more than some of our competitors have in total network usage or capacity!
In addition to providing our customers with our premium network blend of 5 transit providers we are also carrier neutral. So if for any reason the Hivelocity network as it stands is not suitable for you, we will facilitate your bringing in any of the other carriers available in the Tampa market. I will tell you now, not once has our network not been sufficient for a customer and not once has a colocation customer had to bring in another carrier. The same cannot be said for our competitors in Tampa. As a matter of fact, bringing in additional carriers is often the standard for customers at the other Tampa data center s. Sadly again, some of those single-homed data centers wont even let you bring in another carrier. They wont let you bring in another carrier because they make their money by forcing you to take their bandwidth and then over charge you for it.
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- Hivelocity includes bandwidth with each colocation option normally around $5 per Mbps
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- Overage is typically billed at $12.50 per Mbps…often times less.
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- Some of our competitors charge anywhere from $30-65 per Mbps with overage charges above that.
Our customers utilize the Hivelocity network for latency sensitive services such as VOIP, Gaming, Video Streaming, Online Radio Stations, and Live Camera Feeds. If ping time, jitter and tracerts are important to your service then Hivelocity is absolutely the best option for you in a Tampa data center.