Server Geography, Election, NFL Week 9 Picks

I saw that Gawker’s sites, hosted by Datagram, are still on their Tumblr backup servers a full five days after the Sandy disaster first hit. I’m puzzled why any high-traffic site would use a hosting facility in NYC in the first place – aside from the flooding potential that was all too real this week, the real estate is expensive, electricity prices there are some of the highest in the country, and the climate is varied and humid enough that it requires lots of artificial adjustment. You’d want to locate your servers somewhere where:

1. Electricity is cheap to run all the servers and air conditioners,
2. Real estate costs very little so you can physically scale up as big as you want,
3. Small propensity for natural disasters like storms, earthquakes or floods,
4. It’s naturally cool and dry so you can make some use of the natural environment to keep the heat down, and
5. There’s easy access to telecom infrastructure to get your traffic out to the world.

Not sure which place would best fit these criteria — Denver? I guess I’ll open a facility located conveniently next to some craft beer and hiking in Boulder and get this thing going.

• I’m voting for a second term this Tuesday. I still haven’t broken the addiction to political news, so I have detailed nerd frameworks for my vote, but I’m not changing anyone’s mind so I’ll leave it at that. I did think this Economist quote from the mag’s surprising Obama endorsement sums up the problem with Romney, a guy who was a terrific boss when I worked at the 2002 SLC Olympics and otherwise makes a decent leader:
  

  This newspaper would vote for that Mitt Romney, just as it would for the Romney who ran Democratic Massachusetts in a bipartisan way (even pioneering the blueprint for Obamacare). The problem is that there are a lot of Romneys and they have committed themselves to a lot of dangerous things.

  Agreed. Other than that, I’m casting my vote and leaving the rest up to the majority, remembering that the local elections have a lot more to do with my daily life anyway.



• After my first winning week of the season, here’s how I suggest you lose your money betting on the NFL in Week 9:

  Last week: 8-6; Overall: 45-71
  At San Diego -8 Kansas City
  Denver -3.5 At Cincinnati
  At Green Bay -11 Arizona
  Miami -2 At Indianapolis
  Baltimore -3.5 At Cleveland
  At Houston -10 Buffalo
  At Washington -3 Carolina
  Detroit -4 At Jacksonville
  Chicago -3.5 At Tennessee
  At Seattle -5 Minnesota
  At Oakland -1.5 Tampa Bay
  At NY Giants -3.5 Pittsburgh
  At Atlanta -4 Dallas
  At New Orleans -3 Philadelphia