Basic information about the WEDOS data centre project, who we are, our technological background, information about our services
What’s going on?
Since the beginning of 2010, we have been building our data centre (server room) with an area of about 440 m2 with a background of 440 m2 in the village of Hluboká nad Vltavou in South Bohemia. We conceived the whole thing as a “reality show”, which could be called e.g. “How to build a datacenter”.
We want to give the internet community a glimpse into the building of the necessary infrastructure, the decision-making processes and the operation of the technology.
What is our goal?
The aim is to build a top-class and professional data centre or server room, i.e. technological premises designed to house servers connected to the Internet. We don’t want to build and then operate just an ordinary datacentre, but a truly high-quality server room that will be world-class. This is a very large problem as there are a large number of sub-components to be resolved:
- economic budgets and plans
- setting up a company, dealing with all formalities and details related to it
- premises – purchase of property, project, building permit, rough construction, double floors
- connectivity – fast and high-quality optical connection of our network to the rest of the world, Ethernet distribution throughout the building
- peering – connecting our network to the Internet (with Czech companies, with foreign countries), autonomous system, IP addresses, routing
- electricity – electrical connection, switchboard, protection, power distribution, metering, backup sources (UPS, battery and generator)
- cooling – air conditioners, proper air circulation, heat recovery
- extinguishing – gas extinguishing system, other fire protection measures
- security – alarm, surveillance system, physical security, security policy, crisis plans
- offer of services – domain registration, server hosting, web hosting
- manpower – assembling a team of managers, technicians, programmers and customer support staff
- information system – development of ordering systems, WWW pages, customer and service records, automation of operation and maintenance, CRM, invoicing, accounting
- support systems – DNS servers, monitoring
- hardware – selection, purchase and commissioning of hardware (servers, routers, switches)
- promotion – sales and pricing policy, advertising, commission system, loyalty programs
For each item mentioned, we will inform you in detail about our plans, the implementation process and the outcome. We will publish information about tenders and negotiations with suppliers. We describe our decision-making processes in detail and comment on why and how we made our decisions.
Who are we?
For the needs of this new project we have established a new company WEDOS Internet, a.s. (ID 28115708). We are based in Hluboká nad Vltavou (a few kilometres from České Budějovice).
Management:
- Mgr. Josef Grill – majority shareholder, Chairman of the Board of Directors, university degree in law – business, marketing and finance
- Mgr. Petr Stastny – executive and technical director, university degree in computer science
Although our company has only been in existence for a short time, we are no newcomers in this field. Josef Grill founded in 1997 the company P.E.S. consulting, s.r.o. and the company INTERNET CZ, a.s., which are under the common trademark FORPSI the leader on the Czech market of domain registration and web hosting (see www.forpsi.com) with a market share of over 34%. Petr Št’astný worked for these companies for 7 years as a developer, head of the domain department and as an operations director.
Datacenter
This data center is primarily designed to house our technology. We provide web hosting services and offer rental of virtual and dedicated servers. In time we will also offer to host our customers’ servers, but this will be a marginal issue for us.
More: datacentre technology facilities
About this site
We have been reporting in detail on the whole process on these pages and will continue to do so. We will regularly bring you up-to-date information, photos, videos, hold open days and publish all documents and plans. We will discuss with visitors to our company and our website and are happy to answer almost any questions. We will let everyone take a look under the hood of the technologies used and our know-how. With few exceptions, we do not hide anything (today or in the future).
Why do we think we will succeed?
Because we know how to do it. We have the necessary know-how and many years of experience, we are very well versed in this field and we have the necessary contacts.
Today’s competition is fierce, so it will be hard to convince customers. The main argument will be the quality, which will be supported by an unbeatable price. On the one hand, we want to build an absolutely cutting-edge (and one of the most modern in the Czech Republic) datacentre, which will not only be professionally built, but also professionally operated. We also want to have very low operating costs because:
- we will be in our own premises (we won’t have to pay huge rents in telehouses, because most of our competitors have their own premises in Prague datacenters, which they don’t even own, but are just tenants, and therefore they contribute to the profit and overhead of the owners of the buildings)
- we automate as much as possible so that minimum staff is needed (this is the basic idea we try to use in our practice as often as possible)
- we put most technologies and services out to tender and negotiate long negotiations for the best possible terms
- we know how to minimize other costs (especially electricity, which will be the most expensive item in the future)
- wage costs in South Bohemia are undeniably lower than in Prague, where most of the competitors are
Moreover, we know our competitors very well, we know about their weaknesses and strengths. Of course, we are also aware of the areas where we have no chance of competing (at least initially), and therefore we will leave out certain areas of activity and not operate in them.
Why are we doing this “reality show”?
Simply mainly for the sake of promotion:
- We want to show everyone that we really understand these things, that we are not amateurs, that we have a really professional approach and that our services are not only cheap, but absolutely professional.
- We don’t want to be secretive like other competing companies. We want to be fully transparent from the start and thus gain the trust of our customers.
- We do not want to lie to our customers and claim information that is not true. You might wonder what the reality of the Czech internet is in this field. For example, many companies give figures on customer numbers that are just the “wishful thinking” of the management of individual companies.
- Similarly, many companies brag about how they host in various datacenters, but you rarely learn the truth about the fact that they are just there on rent, and you almost never learn the truth about what the datacenter’s parameters actually are. Some commercial datacenters are commercial from the start, unlike ours, which will be (with the utmost care and effort) created for our needs.