The trouble with optimizing your Web server location is that the Internet isn't easy to pin down. It isn't like you are trying to open up a store on a downtown street or near a freeway exit. The fact that your public can be located anywhere in the world and on any network is just one small part of the challenge. Other issues include hazy definitions for such terms as backbone, peering point, primary providers, and network access points. It would help if these were commonly understood and used by the majority of people you talk to, but they aren't.

Another complication is that many providers don't really understand their own network topologies, let alone the network topologies they connect to upstream. (By upstream, I mean a connection to a faster or more capable line, and even that isn't always easy to figure out.) And finally it would help if you could more easily evaluate a potential provider based on the kind of network connections they offered, say, by perusing their Web pages. (I had a hard enough time finding prices for many providers - many try their best not to divulge such information on their Web sites.)

Location: The Place Doesn't Matter

Indeed, when you think about it, why does your cyber-presence have to be located in the same city or country as your physical offices? This is some of the thinking behind such vendors as Akamai and Digital Island, who have established data centers around the world in the best cyber-locations. You may want to do something similar for hosting your own corporate Web site, ideally in a facility that is served by multiple ISPs and with plenty of bandwidth, just in case your site becomes popular.

To get an idea of what is involved in finding choice locations, I have visited three of them over the years in my travels. Everyone has to have a hobby, and mine is going to what I call cyber-buildings, the ultimate in wired chic. These places have more fiber than your favorite bran-laced breakfast cereal, and more T-1s than you can count coming into the premises.

One of them is in New York, where my ISP's offices used to be located, in the Chelsea area. The others were in the Bay Area and in Seattle. The Bay Area location was in a nondescript warehouse in Redwood City, off a side street that was anything but glamorous. It actually houses the root "F" server, an interesting fact. The Seattle location was in an aging high-rise building in the middle of downtown. In traditional physical real estate terms, none of these buildings would make it to the "A" list. All three had seen better days, with nary a fresh coat of paint or fancy lobby fixtures anywhere to be seen. And no one was talking about how many nearby restaurants or shops or other traditional real estate amenities they had.

Location: Connections Do Matter

Yet several things distinguish these cyber-buildings. First, they have lots of fiber to the outside world. The Redwood City site had one of the OC-48 connections that move Internet traffic around the Bay Area. (OC-48 refers to the blazing speed of 2.488 gigabits per second over optical carriers.) The NYC location had multiple fiber connections to different backbone providers, and had an elevator that could handle a small semi to bring gear up to the various floors. The Seattle building had so much fiber running between floors that one elevator shaft was eliminated to make room for all the cabling. This is the first case I know of where people space in an office building has been replaced with electron (or photon) space.

Second, these cyber-buildings have made it easier for multiple ISPs to connect to each other inside, and many ISPs are now locating their server rooms in these buildings because they can cut down on the number of network hops and reduce overall network latencies. The Seattle building had fiber lines from about 80 different ISPs that could be easily cross-connected to anyone's servers located in that building, including connections to several providers in Alaska, Idaho and Oregon.

Third, the buildings have plenty of firepower invested in their networks. The Redwood City building had several hundred thousand dollars' worth of Packet Engines gear to make for fast switching of its packets around the various networks in the machine room. The others were equally impressive. (Amusingly, the Seattle offices used a simple $100 Linksys hub to connect three of the Alaska providers to each other. But that was probably all that was needed.)

Location: Finding One

So how do you find these prime locations? It isn't easy. You can't go to a map of the Internet (or indeed any kind of physical map) and plot them out. There isn't any easy or complete list of real estate agents that will tell you where these buildings are located. Usually it is just word of mouth that brings you to their doorstep.

The ideal location is one that has at least three upstream ISPs, so you can cross-connect to all three and make use of them in case of a catastrophic failure. Sometimes these are called peering points, and you can try to call or email your ISP and see if they will tell you whom they peer with. Usually, they can't or won't, so you have to track this information down. I do this with an interesting tool from AnalogX called FixedOrbit.com. If you know your ISP's name or IP address, you can find out whom this ISP peers with by going to FixedOrbit's Web page and entering the information. The site pulls information from various Internet records created by the ISP, and while it isn't complete, it is probably a good first place to start.

Another way to track down information on your ISP is to look up the ISP's Whois record to see where their name servers are located. I like http://www.easywhois.com/, but there are hundreds of other whois servers around on the Internet. The name server is the machine that translates your alphabetic URL (like http://strom.com) into a specific IP address of the machine with that service. The deeper your name server is buried in an ISP's network, the more time it will take to get packets in and out of there to your visitors.

How do you figure this out? You use a command called traceroute (in Windows it goes by tracert). This shows you the path between your computer and some specific Internet destination, such as your ISP's name server, and it will give you an idea of what routers and links your packets pass from here to there. The problem with traceroute is that it only works from your current location, so a number of good people have put up their own Web-based traceroute gateways allowing you to trace a route from their machine to someplace else out on the Internet. You can use these servers to figure out what kind of connections and ISPs are upstream of your intended provider, and also determine the various pathways into your cyber-building. This Web site offers a good listing of these gateways, along with a Web page that allows you to run multiple traces concurrently from various locations.

Location will become increasingly important as the Internet network infrastructure becomes more complex. But understanding what constitutes a good location in cyberspace and finding the appropriate arrangements are still far from simple, as you can see. Good luck with your sleuthing!

David Strom has written over a thousand articles for various computer trade publications and Web sites, and publishes his own essay series called Web Informant that can be found at http://strom.com. His latest book, Home Networking Survival Guide, was published in Sept. 2001 by McGraw-Hill/Osborne and can be found at Amazon.com and other major book retailers.