I was really surprised at their server farm; I always figured (from the original Wired article) that it was fairly busy with servers.
I guess losing the fiber optic link kind of ruined that. Or, you know, having to put your customers' data into a Zodiac to hang out on a plank of metal in the sea.
That photo was early in the buildout, but yeah, it was a single 300 square foot circular room in one of the towers with 5-10 racks, loosely populated.
We planned to raise $3-5mm plus followon financing, and ended up raising only $1.5mm or so, most of which was spent on mechanical/life safety upgrades to the facility -- we didn't have a whole lot left for datacenter. Losing the 155Mbps link was a big problem -- the best we had was 4xE1 (8Mbps), some caching/CDN, and 128-512k of satellite. Thus, our costs never dropped the way we wanted, so we couldn't really be price competitive.
Wired has a 3-6 month lead time, so the Wired article actually got written while we were first looking at the buildout. This happened to overlap with the collapse of the dotcom bubble.
Each side was 7 (I think) hollow 300sq ft concrete rooms, circular. We had forced air circulation, and AC in the "datacenter" tower (which was 2 rooms of datacenter, some power conditioning, and a NOC); just forced air in the residential one (and some heating using electrical heaters).
During the war, those towers were where people lived, and the lowest levels were shell magazines for the big AA guns (3.9"?). They had a bigger superstructure, too. I absolutely would not have wanted to have been there with 300 people; even with 6-10 it was pretty bad.
I haven't tried to find a cached/mirrored copy of their original sales/pricing page, but from what I remember they explicitly refused 'customer equipment', claiming security risks. The cost included a setup fee which essentially purchased you a brand new rack server already on site. I can't recall what their policy on cancellation was, but I think it was either 'we'll return the whole machine to you' or 'we'll destroy it on your behalf'.
Having new machines shipped out also seems like a better proposition from a risk perspective, since hardware isn't cheap, but it's a whole lot less than some irreplaceable customer hardware, software, or data.
I guess losing the fiber optic link kind of ruined that. Or, you know, having to put your customers' data into a Zodiac to hang out on a plank of metal in the sea.