IT Leaders, This May Be Your One-Stop Shop for Finding Scalable, Cost-Efficient Data Centers

TL; DR: We use Zillow to browse homes. Tinder to meet people. Amazon for buying stuff. But what about data centers? Well, Datacenters.com has the solution for you. As a one-stop marketplace for finding data centers in any city, state, or country, IT professionals can strategically (and quickly) find their next data center location. We talked with Joel St. Germain, Founder and CEO, about how Datacenters.com aims to be the bridge between businesses and data center providers.

I don’t care what the internet says — Connecticut is part of New England, and I’ll scream it from the rooftops until the day I die. OK, with that out of the way, I’m proud to say I was born and raised in the Nutmeg State, which is home to the country’s oldest and most prominent historical sites.

While we don’t have Plymouth Rock or the Liberty Bell, we do have plenty of protected properties, like the Mark Twain House, Mystic Seaport, and many Victorian-era residential homes.

There’s also no shortage of 18th-century neoclassical architecture, with centuries-old buildings complete with decorative stonework and imposing yet grand towering windows. These buildings were once factories for manufacturing some of Connecticut’s most famous contributions, such as firearms, clocks, and textiles. But eventually, like the opening scene of 1995’s “Jumanji,” so many of these factories eventually shut down.

Today, a drive through any once-industrial Connecticut town still displays those classic buildings that sit untouched — or so you would think: After decades of collecting dust, they’re being transformed into offices, breweries, warehouses, apartments, and even data centers.

Yes, really, data centers. In fact, I recognized a few buildings immediately when I browsed Datacenters.com.

Datacenters.com is a hosting provider’s dream, acting as a comprehensive marketplace where you can easily browse and purchase data center space and related services.

In so many of our discussions with hosting providers, I can’t help but notice one recurring theme: They want to add more data centers, but they need to do some research first.

Datacenters.com can help fill that gap.

We talked with Joel St. Germain, Founder and CEO of Datacenters.com, who I think summarized the platform best: “We want to be that bridge to bring the user and the provider together on a centralized platform.”

Like many necessities, Datacenters.com was created to fill a gap where a solution didn’t previously exist. But before its inception, Joel said it all started with a tech consulting firm called Global Communications Group (GCG) that he founded in 2000.

In 2016, when the cloud took everyone by storm, Joel restructured GCG to focus on cloud solutions. It included building a directory of cloud-based data centers to help clients easily find services and hosting providers.

By 2017, GCG purchased the Datacenters.com domain name. Initially starting as a data center map, it quickly evolved into a comprehensive directory that allows users to search data center locations and purchase products and services with just the click of a button.

In 2018, Joel sold GCG and is now solely focusing on Datacenters.com. To this day, it’s still privately owned in Colorado without any investors or debt.

“It’s really emerged as this leading platform for companies to leverage to engage with these data center providers — and it’s amazing to see the growth,” Joel said. “Our goal with this is to continue to be the leader and resource for companies to research and engage in data with the data centers globally.”

I’m the kind of person who doesn’t mind paying a bit more for convenience, which is why I love all-in-one platforms. Call it laziness if you want, but I think it’s just smart — I can’t stand dealing with red-tape or working with third-party providers just to get things done.

If this sounds like you and you’re looking for data center locations or any related services, Datacenters.com will probably make your life easier. Easily search through listings by city, state, or country, whether you’re looking for colocation, cloud, connectivity, hardware, or managed services in one place.

I said it before, but I think the most important thing anyone needs to know about Datacenters.com is that it’s any IT professional’s dream. It’s an all-in-one platform that answers a niche need (finding data center space) that is incredibly easy to use.

Joel noted that there’s been a significant surge lately in the need for data centers, especially among AI and cloud markets, whose companies are growing fast and need more space than ever.

Of course, a major caveat is the inevitable high power costs that are affecting availability. You can filter by price and capacity on Datacenters.com.

Here’s what else you can do:

• Search for data centers or colocation, bare metal, and cloud services near you by city, state, or country
• Get help with capacity and pricing even in this competitive market, where you can get direct information from providers
• Work directly with the providers to get the best deal, or work with Datacenters.com’s in-house team that can help you find what’s best for your hosting needs
• Browse from the Top Countries or Top Providers list to narrow down by geographic location or by the most popular and trusted service companies

Joel explained that getting major data center providers, like Equinix and Digital Realty, to participate was a major win.

Providers are responsible for managing all their data, content, videos, and images. It’s all done through an integrated API so it’s easier for them to generate leads and keep their data up-to-date.

“Having the providers manage it daily, alongside our team, is something we’re really proud of,” Joel said. “It’s a really agnostic platform that these companies are able to leverage.”

Finding data centers is not a problem I’ve ever thought about having, but I liken it to buying a house. When you’re house-hunting, you want all the details about the place — the square footage, the amenities, the neighborhood. The same goes for businesses hunting for data centers: With a healthy variety of up-to-date information, it’s easy to make the right decision.

If you don’t know where to start, no worries there either. Datacenters.com has a consulting team that can help you decide what makes the most sense for your business from a hosting perspective.

“People might wonder, ‘Should we go with colocation? Should we do bare metal? What about the cloud? What are the pros and cons?’” Joel said. “We have tools that will help them do their calculations and see what’s going to make the most sense.”

For example, Datacenters.com provides real-time pricing for colocation, bare metal, and infrastructure services.

“We’ve built a practice around bare metal and infrastructure as a service, allowing companies to lease infrastructure and compute power, including GPUs,” Joel added. “We’ve established partnerships with all the major players offering these services and consolidated everything on one platform.”

I keep seeing a consistent trend with data centers, and it’s centered around green energy.

Whether it’s renewable energy, liquid cooling, or adapting energy-efficient hardware, it’s all necessary if you ask me — primarily since data centers represent about 2% of global electricity usage.

That may not seem like a lot at first glance, but according to one statistic, data center energy consumption will increase so much by 2026 that it could power the entire country of Germany.

Joel said he noticed a lot of this is because of the U.S.

“Other countries are much farther advanced with green energy than the United States,” he added. “It’s why we’re seeing so many international and domestic companies moving outside of the U.S.”

This may come as no surprise to some, especially since the U.S. has a long history of prioritizing profit over public health and safety. (I’m side-eyeing you, Big Pharma…)

And yet, I remain optimistic.

With the ongoing sustainability movement, the U.S. stands a chance to be a major player in the renewable energy industry. Take Amazon and Microsoft, for example, who are some of the biggest corporate buyers of renewable energy.

But the future of data centers is green in more ways than one. I’m talking about energy efficiency and lessening carbon footprints, yes, but also about finding the best available capacity without breaking the bank.

“There’s a big need right now in the market where companies are clamoring for space, but where is the capacity?” Joel said. “Some of these markets in the top tier and tier-two cities — like Silicon Valley, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix — are all getting sold out of. And so it forces businesses to ask, where is the capacity, not only domestically, but internationally?”

As a result, Datacenters.com has been building out a capacity database complete with a power cost heat map. A heat map visually represents data using different colors to indicate various levels of a particular metric.

“The heat map isn’t only centered capacity but also the pricing of energy and power,” Joel said. “Bringing those two worlds together into a single tool so companies can really understand where the capacity is and at what price point is a valuable piece of insight.”

In this case, we’re talking about availability and cost, so that it may be that red = high cost, yellow = mid-cost, and blue = low cost. Basically, heat maps are an easy way to understand cost distribution across different regions (which is obviously crucial for any hosting provider since good ping time is the name of the game).

So, whether it’s colocation, bare metal infrastructure, GPU leasing, or other services, companies can access real-time pricing, capacity, and power cost data with Datacenters.com. Plus, with consulting and support services, Datacenters.com can help make the move.

Check Datacenters.com out today.