President's Day at a California Startup Company
 

We are launching our first product in March, so everyone is very focused and trying to execute on our plan.

The VP of Finance polled employees if they planned to go into the office and work that day. He decided to pay the landlord the additional fee for Air Conditioning on February 20.

Thank goodness. Even with A/C, I manage the window blinds daily to avoid too much heat in my cubile. I think I'm going to have to change cubicles before summer hits if I am too hot in "winter".

There is a clause in our lease saying we can not have public web servers in our office space. CA landlords expect companies to have third-party data centers. Even so, we have staging servers and such, and a free-standing room A/C for the in-house server room.

In the middle of February, it's really hot in office cubilces here.

What a joke. They have higher rates for switchroom space? Are you allowed to have telephone switchgear?

Big load on the HVAC system with all that electronic gear. I guess in CA the cost of air conditioning is a major factor for landlords. :mg:

I doubt it. Office space means office space. This is no joke. Servers have gotten smaller, faster, and hotter. The density is such that they wipe out all the power and A/C of buildings. My friend owns a data center company and he maxed out one building and had to lease an additional building. There's plenty of floor space and the racks of 1U servers have an empty slot between servers.

For our first product launch we will have 40 servers in production. We hope to grow our business to 1,000 servers by year's end. En Fuego!

With that many servers, why don't you use an offsite datacenter?

It's also a nice way to avoid liability if there is a fire, water leak, or anything that destroys a public server. The landlord can't be liable for the loss of information on a server hosting hundreds of different companies or tens of thousands of individuals if the presence of that server on the premises was a violation of the lease.

That's one reason people pay hosting companies with the implication that they will have at least some minimum level of care in providing physical security for the servers.

Good point, Rich, but I wonder is that really means anything today. The lawyers are going after the deepest pockets anyway, responsibility be damned. :confused:

Most commercial leases in CA are written to allow the landlord to pass the utility expenses through to the tenants. Sounds like your landlord screwed up.

Yes, that's what we are doing. We only have about 10 development/staging servers in our office equipment room.

No matter how it is priced, there is still max A/C capacity for a building. They have to ration it among all tenants.