We regularly conduct market research, compile tables with prices and a bunch of parameters for dozens of data centers. Here I thought that good should not be wasted. The data itself may be useful to someone, while others may take the structure as a basis. IN presented data from 2016. But there were few tables and they made more graphs and , plus supplemented with open data from the tax on turnover taxes and employees, data from RIPE (LIR status, subnets and total number of IPv4) and data from the ping-admin rating (Uptime and crashes).
Who was in the sample
The table for September 2020 includes everyone who is in the TOP-20 in Yandex and Google, is present there in advertising places, and who has prices on the site. If a company is not on the air or prices are on demand, then it is definitely not a competitor in the open market. Such a company may even have good orders, for example, government ones, but this is a separate feeder, you can even be a leader there, but this has nothing to do with competition in the market.
If a part of the prices is closed, then the data is not displayed in this range. For example, if it says that the tariff includes 350W or 100Mbps or 1 IP address and there are no prices for additional power, channel expansion or additional IPv4 below.
Pricing issues
In the prices for colocation services, clients were most infuriated by hidden fees. This was a huge problem in the noughties with traffic. Nobody knew in advance what kind of traffic he would have and everyone was afraid to “fly”. But at the same time, there are no miracles. The cost of 100 Mbps then was about 50 rubles. Now gigabit is already cheaper. Time passes, and pricing is still very muddy for many, and there is no comprehensive price list on the providers' websites. Tariffs are built in different ways, with certain parameters it is profitable for the price of one supplier, with an increase in parameters, it is already more profitable for another.
And, of course, we must not forget that the price is far from the only indicator. You need to look at other parameters, although it is more difficult to compare. ihor somehow ended up in our table. I didn't even want to add it to the database. But then I thought that it would be a negative example, a company with one employee, 22 thousand taxes and 43 thousand contributions, is quite indicative. But “people hawala”.
General trends and market problems
The charts visually show the general trend of the market.
The first graph shows the dependence of cost on power, other things being equal. Power is a sore subject for both customers and data centers. Electricity is now one of the main components in the monthly costs of data centers, and the government is steadily increasing tariffs for it. Although cheap electricity is the result of production, jobs and taxes. We are kind of like an energy superpower, but we can't say that we have very competitive prices compared to Western data centers.
At the same time, on the one hand, money is taken for air, since it is calculated according to the rated power, and not according to the consumed. It is difficult and expensive to calculate a separate server in terms of power consumption, you need to put a meter on each outlet. But on the other hand, the server can potentially operate at almost the full power of the power supply. And you also need to take into account that you need to add 30% to the server power consumption for cooling, 10% for industrial UPSs, and another 10% for light and office needs. But I’ll tell you a secret, on average, one server consumes 100W, since 5kW is supplied to the rack and this is enough.
Most hosters charge money for capacity. But there are those on the market who do not take. Naturally, the outlet still has a limitation. Getting a megawatt at the price of placing one unit will not work.
Some of those who do not take money for power on sites have reservations that GPU servers, blades and other stoves are placed at separate rates.
The second graph shows the dependence of the cost on the speed of the port. Channel speed is an even more non-trivial topic than electricity. Electricity has no concept of quality. It can blink, but there is a UPS + DGU for this. But two gigabit channels can be of very, very different quality. One can merge everything into an exchanger, have poor visibility, high pings, restrictions on foreign traffic. And for channels there is no UPS or DGU for such cases. Therefore, comparing channel prices is practically useless.
When we conducted market research on the cost of a gigabit in Moscow, we were asked questions: “what kind of traffic will it be?”, “and what are the peaks?”.
At the inter-operator level, there is also a mess with prices. Channels are very different in terms of money and quality.
What makes sense to pay attention to
It must be understood that there, of course, there cannot be one correct opinion, everything depends on the task, and even in such tasks, everyone ultimately decides for himself which risks he takes and which not.
In our opinion, Tier III certification plays a role. And this is not only in our opinion, as advertising is full of Tier III. You can type in Yandex: “hosting a server in a data center”, press Ctrl + F and count how many times the word Tier occurs.
But with this certification and positioning themselves as Tier III, many have fallen into a trap. A normal Tier III data center is when there are three certificates: for a project, for capabilities and for operation, and the last one needs to be confirmed every two years. And many do not even have a certificate for the project.
Turnovers show large companies and small ones. For some reason, there are no middle ones. The pros and cons of big and small are clear. A number of large companies, by the way, are not engaged in small retail at all. They are aimed at large clients and sell colocation service only by racks. And it is right. When we were in BST, they were always bombarded by our marketing. Well, they did not know how and could not give a good retail service. This is a different business and different services. Shoe nails must not be hammered with a sledgehammer. From myself I will also say that, other things being equal, support small businesses for the sake of diversity and competition.
Conclusion
Not everyone was added to the database. Therefore, you can send data who should be added. But those who wish should have prices on the site.
If you know more data sources that should be loaded, please let us know and we will try to add them.
Source: habr.com