The technician who answers helps to calm your nerves by assuring you that the building hasn’t blown up, and starts working with you to try and figure out what’s going on. They go out to your rack, and report that everything looks visibly normal. Every device appears to have power, and network ports have link and are showing activity. Within minutes, they’ve narrowed down the issue to your rack’s core router, consoled it, found that one of your BGP sessions to another provider was down, and your route-map was incorrectly configured so traffic never failed over. 3 minutes later, the router, and the rest of your rack, are back online.

 

Triumphantly you call your boss, who instead of firing you, gives you a raise, and then pulls out a harmonica and invites you up on stage with him to perform ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ in front of a sold-out crowd. About that time, you hear a faint ringing that jars you out of your sleep…

All joking aside, colocation and cloud solutions are a great way to add stability, redundancy, and peace-of-mind to your company's daily operations. The problem is, people sometimes forget about the most important aspect of their contracts: remote hands. When choosing a provider, you need to think about those 2am meltdowns, and how your provider will be able to handle them. If you choose a provider whose technicians are nothing more than “the reboot squad”, you’re gonna have a bad time.

On the other hand, putting your confidence in trained, knowledgeable support staff, who understand not only what your gear is, but how it’s supposed to work, will save you from those terrible times when you need to cut your Disney vacation short to fly back and swap out a RAID card.