Leased line in Ireland

SimpleSam06

Does anyone have any idea as to the price/speeds of leased lines in Ireland? I'm looking into setting up a hosting company so we need something dependable...

SeaSide

I hope that you can ask a better question than that if your looking to get into that line of business???

BKtje

I'd suggest ringing Eircom/BT. They'd (probably )know much better than we would for your particular needs.

SimpleSam06

SeaSide wrote:

I hope that you can ask a better question than that if your looking to get into that line of business???

Its surprisingly hard to get any information out of eircom about it. They don't publish the pricing on the internet, or anywhere else I could spot, and the closest I could find was a newspaper article complaining about €200 to €300 for a 1.5Mb leased line per month, for the first 5km anyway. How accurate that is is anyone's guess. Email didn't get any response for the last two weeks, so before joining the eircom department roulette treadmill by phoning, I thought I might ask people around here if they knew anything about it.

Apparently not!

murf

I *think* that the costs are largely dependant on where you are in relation to the leased line facility. The further you are from the exchange etc. the more you pay, I suspect.

It's expensive, but the SLA is great compared to ordinary broadband.

Get in touch with Esat BT and Eircom. If you're in the city, you have more choice - try magnet, NTL etc.

jmcc

SimpleSam06 wrote:

Does anyone have any idea as to the price/speeds of leased lines in Ireland? I'm looking into setting up a hosting company so we need something dependable...

Just get a few boxes in a data centre. That is how most hosters do it. The cost of setting up a multiple line data centre from scratch is a bit high. The cost of dedicated bandwidth on a leased line in Ireland is still high and quite frankly is a waste of money given the profiles of most hosted sites.

Regards...jmcc

SimpleSam06

jmcc wrote:

Just get a few boxes in a data centre. That is how most hosters do it. The cost of setting up a multiple line data centre from scratch is a bit high.

I've been down that road many times already, and I'm completely fed up with what passes for customer service among the hosting companies in Ireland, as well as a few bad experiences in a datacentre in Dublin. So myself and a few investors are going to look at setting up our own company, and doing it right. After all, the cost matters not a damn so long as you are making a profit! Its also become an infrastructural need on several projects as well, so may as well roll it into one.

SeaSide

OK

Where are you?
How much bandwidth do you need / How much do you have to spend?

WizZard

Maybe look into the bigger datacentres in the Dublin region, if you've been dealing with primarily hosting companies before then that's the next step up.
Rent a cage/floorspace from one of the bigger providers.

Unless you've got a *lot* to spend then you're not going to have a proper setup (redundant internet links, fully redundant power, etc). The better and cheaper option would be to go the datacentre route.

layke

I don't suppose you can be more specific as to what you actually want to host?

SimpleSam06

SeaSide wrote:

Where are you?
How much bandwidth do you need / How much do you have to spend?

Not a huge amount of bandwidth at the moment, we'd be alright with an E2 to get rolling. The watchword is scalability of course. We're in Galway presently.

WizZard wrote:

Unless you've got a *lot* to spend then you're not going to have a proper setup (redundant internet links, fully redundant power, etc). The better and cheaper option would be to go the datacentre route.

Again, its not how much it costs, its how much it can (will) make, and over what timeframe. If you have something that costs a million euros, but will earn 1.2 million in the first year, you can tell four investors they will earn 50 grand apiece for the year, or a 20% return on their investment. Try making that on the stock market and see how far you get!

layke wrote:

I don't suppose you can be more specific as to what you actually want to host?

No, but the facilities would definetely be open for other companies and the public to use.

WizZard

SimpleSam06 wrote:

Again, its not how much it costs, its how much it can (will) make, and over what timeframe. If you have something that costs a million euros, but will earn 1.2 million in the first year, you can tell four investors they will earn 50 grand apiece for the year, or a 20% return on their investment. Try making that on the stock market and see how far you get!

Have you priced anything for this? Air-con/power/space/racks/etc come to mind straight away.
A (successful) hosting company is more than just a couple of servers and a leased line.
You'd be *far* better off talking to the likes of the larger datacentre providers in Ireland as they can take all the worry about this sort of thing off your hands.

SimpleSam06 wrote:

No, but the facilities would definetely be open for other companies and the public to use.

So you want to open/build your own datacentre?

steve-hosting36

There's a lot more involved with doing what you suggest than what you seem to realise. Hosting companies can lease you servers at vastly better economies of scale than you can do yourself, or if you want to buy all your own kit (servers, routers, switches, firewalls, backup solutions, etc) then get some colo in a major carrier neutral datacentre (which will cost you from about 800 euro per month per rack (typically including minimal (or no) power and no IP transit). Then you'll need to contract with two or more carriers for connectivity, with prices from 200-400 euro per Mbps down, depending on your committed rates.

Obviously that's a vastly simplified version, but there is a very sensible reason practically every host in Ireland use third party facilities (barring ourselves).

SeaSide

SimpleSam06 wrote:

Not a huge amount of bandwidth at the moment, we'd be alright with an E2 to get rolling. The watchword is scalability of course. We're in Galway presently.

An E2??? Have heard of it but never seen one. In Galway you'll have a choice of BB players NTL, BT and Eircom plus those on the MAN (Magnet and Smart AFAIK).

Probably better off going for Ethernet rather than TDM which will allow you to scale.

steve-hosting36

Depending on your exact location, you'll get fiber from e-net to backhaul you to Dublin - expect to spend about 12-15k per annum for a 2mb link, then factor your IP transit costs on top of that (that also wont give you any redundancy).

SimpleSam06

WizZard wrote:

Have you priced anything for this?

Most of it, yes.

WizZard wrote:

So you want to open/build your own datacentre?

Well what I really wanted was an idea for the price of an E2 line, tbh...

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Hosting companies can lease you servers at vastly better economies of scale than you can do yourself

Will they pay me to lease the servers? Because if we have our own profitable operation here, thats what it boils down to. The difficulty is never trying to get money; its getting the money back.

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Obviously that's a vastly simplified version, but there is a very sensible reason practically every host in Ireland use third party facilities (barring ourselves).

Well having actually used 365 services, and then stopped using your services (a bit like boards.ie actually), I have to say, if you lot can manage it, it can't be that hard.

steve-hosting36

Hi Simplesam,

It's not a matter of getting paid to host servers, it's a simple fact that you will reach profitability sooner by not trying to build a hosting facility in Galway.

Boards.ie reasons for moving to digiweb are well documented and nothing to do with 365 service levels. Our lot do manage a datacentre, we're also 54 people in two countries, a 25,000 square foot building, 3 fiber rings, 6 carriers, peering exchanges and millions of euro worth of infrastructure (not including servers, routers, etc).

Hosting isnt easy to do well, and it's certainly not cheap.

Perhaps you need to do a bit more reading/research or talk to some people who know what they are talking about before casting aspersions on people who do.

SimpleSam06

steve-hosting36 wrote:

It's not a matter of getting paid to host servers, it's a simple fact that you will reach profitability sooner by not trying to build a hosting facility in Galway.

Its not just reaching profitability sooner, its cutting out the middleman and turning a cost into a profit.

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Boards.ie reasons for moving to digiweb are well documented and nothing to do with 365 service levels.

Yes, if they had stayed with you they would have been among the thousands (?) of sites knocked offline for most of June the 15th.

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Our lot do manage a datacentre, we're also 54 people in two countries, a 25,000 square foot building, 3 fiber rings, 6 carriers, peering exchanges and millions of euro worth of infrastructure (not including servers, routers, etc).

And yet you didn't even manage to keep your phones working during that situation (not for the first time either).

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Perhaps you need to do a bit more reading/research or talk to some people who know what they are talking about before casting aspersions on people who do.

I most certainly will. Thats why I'm here.

WizZard

SimpleSam06, being annoyed with H365 isn't a good reason to build your own datacentre. As Steve has pointed out, there's a lot more to building/maintaining one that meets the eye.
The fact that you are here looking for prices for an E2 line shows that you haven't researched this in enough detail.

Your investors better have very, very deep pockets, and be in this for the long haul (even if they are, they'd see a far better return on profits if you went the way you've been advised here)

steve-hosting36

In fairness Sam, what WizZard just said is very apt. http://www.cix.ie/ is an example of a hosting centre being built right now in Cork, they have an excellent blog online in which you can read all about the work. As is clear from it, they are spending millions on infrastructure alone.

As for your E2 query, in practice only E1 and E3 are ever really used (not even sure what an E2 is), and these days the technology has been pretty much replaced by Layer 2 / MPLS over fiber.

SimpleSam06

WizZard wrote:

The fact that you are here looking for prices for an E2 line shows that you haven't researched this in enough detail.

And yet here I have Steve from one of the largest hosting companies in Ireland talking to me. So was it a bad idea to post here or not?

WizZard wrote:

Your investors better have very, very deep pockets, and be in this for the long haul (even if they are, they'd see a far better return on profits if you went the way you've been advised here)

Well that depends what you want to sell, now, doesn't it?

steve-hosting36 wrote:

(not even sure what an E2 is)

Its an 8.448 Mbit/s (128 Channel) line.

steve-hosting36 wrote:

these days the technology has been pretty much replaced by Layer 2 / MPLS over fiber.

Well I haven't heard of any widespread replacement of leased lines, but I'll take a look at it, thanks. Whatever about hosting 365, Steve, I have no doubt you are very knowledgeable in this area.

steve-hosting36

SimpleSam06 wrote:

And yet here I have Steve from one of the largest hosting companies in Ireland talking to me. So was it a bad idea to post here or not?

THE largest infact, but that still doesn't -really- make boards.ie a great place to research the Irish hosting industry

SimpleSam06 wrote:

Well I haven't heard of any widespread replacement of leased lines, but I'll take a look at it, thanks. Whatever about hosting 365, Steve, I have no doubt you are very knowledgeable in this area.

Not so much replacement, but certainly hosting companies these days tend to require more bandwidth than 8mbps (or even the 45mbps offered by E3 lines). All of our links to the internet are delivered as Gig-E Ethernet trunks (1000Mbps) and we have 6 of them at the moment.

To give you a general idea, hosting365 has spent (conservatively) 10m euro in the last three years on kit, infrastructure, etc and, as you say, even we have issues (albeit rarely).

SimpleSam06

steve-hosting36 wrote:

THE largest infact, but that still doesn't -really- make boards.ie a great place to research the Irish hosting industry

Well first point, what makes you think my inquiries are reserved to board.ie, and second point, I wasn't researching the Irish hosting industry, just inquiring did anyone have a clue about leased line prices, since these are not published.

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Not so much replacement, but certainly hosting companies these days tend to require more bandwidth than 8mbps (or even the 45mbps offered by E3 lines). All of our links to the internet are delivered as Gig-E Ethernet trunks (1000Mbps) and we have 6 of them at the moment.

To give you a general idea, hosting365 has spent (conservatively) 10m euro in the last three years on kit, infrastructure, etc and, as you say, even we have issues (albeit rarely).

So eh, since you didn't set up all that for the good of your health, you must be expecting to make back that 10m euro in a reasonable timeframe.

Not really putting me off the idea, here.

steve-hosting36

Hey, if you've got ten million euro in the bank that you dont need for 5 or 6 years and are prepared to risk losing -all- of it, while competing with everyone else in this field - then enjoy

SimpleSam06

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Hey, if you've got ten million euro in the bank that you dont need for 5 or 6 years

And that timeframe is 5 to 6 years. Thanks!

steve-hosting36

rofl - you certainly have a knack for simplification There might be -one- or two other factors involved.

SimpleSam06

steve-hosting36 wrote:

rofl - you certainly have a knack for simplification There might be -one- or two other factors involved.

Well if we can sort out a working phone system, that puts us ahead of the game by my reckoning.

steve-hosting36

You do that

jmcc

SimpleSam06 wrote:

Well if we can sort out a working phone system, that puts us ahead of the game by my reckoning.

And then there is the inconvenient matter of clients. Having a few locals from Galway or whereever host on your servers is not enough. To play in the big league against Hosting365, Blacknight Solutions and Novara, you will need serious funds. You will also need people who know the hosting business in Ireland. And simply being a bottom feeder (selling domains and hosting at or below cost) does not work well in the Irish market. For about two years, the figures tend to be ballistic but then in the late second or third year, the figures fall back dramatically and churn rises. A number of Irish hosters have tried this strategy to get big quick - they all reach a glass ceiling and begin to fall back. The three hosters above have more market share than the ISPs and the ISPs are arguably better funded. That should tell you something about the cluefactor required and the competitiveness of the Irish hosting market. So unless you really have the team required, and the funding required, and the market intelligence required, you should just hire space in a datacentre.

Regards...jmcc

SimpleSam06

jmcc wrote:

And then there is the inconvenient matter of clients.

Isn't there always?

jmcc wrote:

Having a few locals from Galway or whereever host on your servers is not enough. To play in the big league against Hosting365, Blacknight Solutions and Novara, you will need serious funds.

If I didn't enjoy the arrogance of competitors so much, I'd probably make some sort of an outburst around now...

jmcc wrote:

The three hosters above have more market share than the ISPs and the ISPs are arguably better funded.

Let me ask you a question. What marketshare did these companies have when they were founded, back in prehistory - you know, five to eight years ago?

jmcc

SimpleSam06 wrote:

Isn't there always?
If I didn't enjoy the arrogance of competitors so much, I'd probably make some sort of an outburst around now...

Well this is no place for crying and tantrums. The webhosters forum was closed because of this.

Let me ask you a question. What marketshare did these companies have when they were founded, back in prehistory - you know, five to eight years ago?

Hosting365:
http://www.whoisireland.com/IEDRresellers/HOSTING365.IE.History-2000-2005.php

Blacknight:
http://www.whoisireland.com/IEDRresellers/BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM.History-2000-2005.php

Novara (before it rebranded completely):
http://www.whoisireland.com/IEDRresellers/HOST.IE.History-2000-2005.php

The market at that time was completely different. The ISPs were dominant and had the bulk of the Irish market. They were vulnerable to the second generation hosting service providers (HSPs). Now the ISPs only account for 16.75% or so of the Irish market while large hosters like those above account for 65.52% of the Irish market.

Regards...jmcc