How we decide where to put a rack
Interconnection, fibre diversity, a jurisdiction that fits in one sentence, and the power price that does not spike. Plus the mistake that taught us to verify duct maps.
Interconnection first
A site is only as good as the fabric it joins. Before we sign anything we want the building to sit on an internet exchange we can join with a real port, and we want at least three carriers on the wall whose paths out of the country do not rhyme. The peering count on the network page — 860 sessions — is the result of that rule, and it is why a server in Frankfurt talks to 8 ms of London rather than a transatlantic detour.
We also read the building's tenant list. A hall full of hosting companies is a feature: it means the power, cooling and fibre were built for people like us, and it means the neighbours understand what a 2 a.m. cable pull is for.
Fibre diversity, checked by walking it
Every vendor claims diverse paths. We verify by walking the route with the facility's engineers and looking at the duct map, because 'diverse' has been known to mean 'diverse until kilometre four, where both fibres share one duct for 400 metres'. A shared duct is a shared shovel — one digger removes both paths and your redundancy with them.
This rule exists because we violated it once. Our 2024 Paris expansion was approved on a vendor's route diagram that showed two clean paths out of La Défense. A maintenance drill the following spring found the paths converged in a single duct under one street. Nothing had failed; that is exactly when you find these things. We added a third, genuinely independent route and changed the checklist so the walk happens before the contract, not after the incident.
Jurisdiction that fits in one sentence
We have a test for every candidate site: can we explain what its law means for a customer's data in one sentence, without wincing? Germany passes: 'your data stays under the GDPR and German law, and that is the point.' The Netherlands passes: 'no data-retention duty, and the AUP still applies.' Switzerland passes: 'outside the EU, stable, and expensive enough that you will only be here on purpose.'
The test rejects more sites than the market does. We do not operate in Hong Kong because the honest sentence about its data law has changed three times since 2020 and we do not sell servers on sentences that need a lawyer on retainer. Jurisdiction is a product feature, and like every feature it ships with documentation.
Power prices that do not spike
We do not chase the cheapest megawatt-hour, because the cheapest contract in Europe is usually the one being renegotiated next year, and renegotiation is risk wearing a suit. We look for industrial rates whose history is a flat line: hydro-heavy grids, regulated markets, places where a cold snap does not become a board meeting.
The same logic covers the building: A+B feeds are table stakes, and the diesel autonomy number matters less than the facility's record of actually testing the transfer under load. A generator that has never been asked to work is a paperweight with a fuel tank.
The mistake we made anyway
Every process above exists because of a failure somewhere behind it, and the duct-map story is the honest one: we trusted a diagram, found the truth during a drill, and fixed it before it became an incident. The site survived because the process caught up in time; the checklist changed because it did not catch it earlier.
We publish this because the alternative is pretending the decisions are made by algorithm. They are made by people who have walked the ducts, read the advisories and — in at least one case — re-cabled a backplane on a Friday night. The next site will be chosen the same way, and the post-mortem after it will be published the same way.