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So you want to build your own data center

(blog.railway.com)
596 points dban | 1 comments | 17 Jan 25 20:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.338s | source
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jonatron ◴[17 Jan 25 22:24 UTC] No.42743915[source]▶
Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?
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chatmasta ◴[18 Jan 25 00:29 UTC] No.42744684[source]▶
It seems a bit disingenuous but it’s common practice. Even the hyperscalers, who do have their own datacenters, include their colocation servers in the term “datacenter.” Good luck finding the actual, physical location of a server in GCP europe-west2-a (“London”). Maybe it’s in a real Google datacenter in London! Or it could be in an Equinix datacenter in Slough, one room away from AWS eu-west-1.

Cloudflare has also historically used “datacenter” to refer to their rack deployments.

All that said, for the purpose of the blog post, “building your own datacenter” is misleading.

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1. motorest ◴[18 Jan 25 13:13 UTC] No.42748087[source]▶
> It seems a bit disingenuous but it’s common practice. Even the hyperscalers, who do have their own datacenters, include their colocation servers in the term “datacenter.”

I think you're conflating things.

Those hypothetical hyperscalers can advertise their availability zones and deployment regions, but they do not claim they built the data centers. They provide a service, but they do not make broad claims on how they built infrastructure.