California Community Colocation Project Takes Off

The California Community Colocation Project, or CCCP, was launched in February 2002 as the world's first formal non-profit to focus exclusively on the needs of the not-for-profit colocation community. The CCCP is a project of the Online Policy Group of San Francisco. We already host the backend for the Special Olympics, some Indymedia sites, streaming Tibetan Buddhist MP3s and the International Workers of the World. We run an IRC node for freenode (formerly OPN) to assist the development of open-source software. There is no charge for hosting at CCCP.

Here is the current state of things in the colo: we have people coming in fast and thick. This is great, but it also poses some interesting challenges that keep us on our toes.

Currently our two cabinets at Hurricane Electric are almost full, and very soon we are going to expand into the cabinet next door, 4.03. (We also have 4.04 reserved.) This move is about three months ahead of the date we estimated on our growth schedule. This rate of growth is partially due to a change in our policy regarding boxes that are less than 2U in size. That is, we do not allow them in a cabinet, because we'll run out of electricity before running out of real estate when populating it with 1U and 2U servers. In addition, doubling one's electricity doubles one's real estate bills, so one might as well be casual about real estate and permit big boxes. (Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.)

We've had some fairly bigwig folks interested in our services. Just today a popular "tier one" non-profit host responsible for millions of page views a day came knocking.

Thankfully, we're also getting new help for all this expansion. Scott and Mike Shinn, the self-described "serial entrepreneurs" who worked for the White House, founded Plesk, the software we'll be using for virtual hosting.They are busy doing all sorts of wonderful things on the East Coast, in addition to helping out in earnest with security and with preparing our setup for virtual hosting. They even may donate some serious server hardware to help us do virtual hosting and to give us advanced "sandwitch" IDS capability, letting us automatically shut attackers out of the colo. We're also receiving help from several designers and a web coder to help us overhaul our web site and design a logo for the CCCP.

Our project is based entirely on donations and volunteers. None of us are getting money from CCCP, and 100% of all donations goes towards space and bandwidth for non-profits.

Our clients are using 41 IP addresses on 27 servers, with four more servers of our own, all on two managed switches (soon to be five). We use SNMP to monitor client bandwidth usage and MRTG to graph the results. We use all Cisco gear for our network infrastructure.

My goal when founding this project was to build to 100 client computers in three years. Now it looks like we may reach that goal much sooner.

David E. Weekly is founder and executive director of the California Community Colocation Project.