About Us

Colo4Atlanta was created as a result of several IT guys being sick of the way normal data center operations were going. We've all worked in well known Atlanta data centers and have pretty much seen it all. This can probably be called our "rant" page, but it's the basis behind our business model and the desire to do things right for our customers.

There are several of us involved in this company and it's sub-companies, we're not new to the IT field, and most of this team has a very broad range of talent. We aren't in it for the money, sure we're trying to make a good living, but we genuinely enjoy what we do, which leads us into our rant below...

While all of us have worked at various other data centers we've watched day in and day out how sales guys lied to customers to get them moved in, we've watched the owner(s) of the companies brag about IPS/IDS systems they "had" but they were either on 90 day trials or never existed, we've watched customers get billed large amounts >$40 just for pushing a reset button. We've watched day after day lies made up by owners about why the network failed when it should have been redundant, why the "quality" server hardware was always failing, and why the power circuit tripped taking out many customers at once.

It all comes down to bad management, planning, and a general lack of caring. The golden rule seems to be if they're making money and there's not mass complaining going on, then leave it the way it is to save the money/time spent fixing a problem BEFORE it happens. Well, we got tired of this...Working as techs and engineers we saw it all, and we obviously couldn't tell the customers what's really going on as our own jobs depended on the lies being fed to them.

A good example would be building out your 3rd data center and you still can't plan the power layout properly so you run into overloads on certain legs of power. Who suffers for this mistake? well the customers do, and there's always some made up excuse that puts the blame on the customer or a neighboring customer, it's always something other than the real answer "it's our fault, we planned this wrong". It doesn't take a degree in electrical engineering to realize running the 200AMP main breaker in a distribution panel at 198AMPs means you're asking for a disaster. Somehow when it trips it will either be lied about to be a smaller problem than the actual scale of it, or it will be blamed on some server related part...we always found it funny how suddenly an entire rack of servers would have a "bad power supply", yet magically they would all come back online within seconds of each other when we "fixed" the problem. The trick to that lie was always based on how many customers had more than one server on the same affected power circuit. The key to it is most customers never interact with each other, so the odds were very slim that they would put together the big picture and realize that a quarter of the data center was down because of that overloaded circuit breaker.

Another big point would be 12 hour burn-out shifts, everyone involved in Colo4Atlanta has been on those overworked 12 hour night shifts working ALONE, managing entire data centers and customer support. We've all been there...there at 3am and so burnt out that you're second guessing every command you run on a customer server while trying to recover data from a dead/dying drive. And yes we've seen the typos that cost customers some of their own customers, all this was to keep from spending money on the staff needed. We've even been in situations where we're clearing hacks off of a customer server one minute and then fixing a leak in the roof 10 mins later.

There have been those posts on web hosting forums complaining about support, and how the company owners blew it off as "growing pains" when they were just too cheap to staff the shifts correctly. Then there's the funny sales guys who claim to have 20+ level 3 techs on staff and how we're a "world class" data center, when there wasn't even 20 people in the entire company, much less the 2-3 techs who excelled past level 1 of anything.

We could go on and on about the drama and lies that go on behind the scenes of the data centers we've worked for, please remember, just because a data center brags about being the premiere, world/carrier class facility, doesn't mean they're not the biggest dump in the area.

We never thought this was fair, not to the customers, nor to the techs and engineers who ended up being the "bad guys" for following the company directions and ripping customers off...but its water under the bridge now and simply the drive behind our business model:

1) Customer service comes first
2) Employee morale and motivation is a close second
3) Be honest with our customers
4) Plan before doing
5) Learn from the mistakes of others
6) Enjoy what we do or don't do it at all

In your search for a colocation and/or bandwidth provider you may or may not choose us, but for your own sake take our advice and visit the location you decide on BEFORE you signup. Take the time to explore the location as best you can, look out for poor/messy cabling, random unlocked doors/cabinets, and general lack of organization. It's truly amazing the scary things you will find happening in a data center, and how fragile of an infrastructure some of these places have by taking several minutes to look around.