Usually, the collocated service provider maintains the physical hardware, as well as routers, and communications lines. To this end, customers either have the SRM tools they need or they don't. The reports allow customers to pinpoint the files causing the growth and also to select files that could be deleted. Vittoria says he runs the report free as a courtesy to customers who may not be aware of third-party products. Unlike traditional Web hosting services, Rackspace, a startup in San Antonio, Texas, enables mostly small and midsize organizations to rent custom-built and configured Linux servers.
Customers manage their servers and storage, at least for now.
On the other hand, Yoo said that when a server gets to about 150GB, some customers become concerned about disk crashes and losing data. Within less than three years, Exodus, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has become the largest provider of worldwide e-business datacenters with the security of Fort Knox. Organizations, such as Ebay, Microsoft and Merrill Lynch, host their servers at one of the 30 worldwide Exodus data centers. Exodus, however, has gone beyond Web hosting to offer managed networking services which allow customers remotely to get realtime critical server metrics. Not all of Exodus's customers feel comfortable managing their servers with tools from Exodus.