It’s Boulder Startup Week! After 16 plus years, Indra’s Net is pretty far from being a startup, but I love Startup week and I’m planning to attend many of the events. Why should I care if Boulder attracts new startups? Selfishly, I could say that someone them might become Indra’s customers (and you should). Practically, I could say that growing Boulder’s economy benefits everyone. But for me personally, it’s the energy startups and the people involved in them bring to the community.

When we started Indra’s Net we could have done it anywhere. We chose Boulder for a number of reasons, demand for our services, lack of competition, quality of life, and the strong tech community. Those first two? That’s your business and your mileage will vary. Quality of life? Look out the window or google “Boulder best city”.

It’s that last one, tech community that still keeps me excited to be here. When we started Indra’s Net it was strong, there was The Rocky Mountain Internet User Group, still going, but then the tech geek social event that New Tech (Boulder Denver) is now. There were no shortage of user group meetings. There was the Colorado Internet Coop that was formed by various startups to share the cost of bringing a (then amazingly fast) T3 Internet connection to Boulder. It was a good scene.

Today, the Boulder Tech Scene is even better. Countless startups doing cutting edge things in the web and mobile space, with software as a service, and social network. Meetup, Drinkups, Coffees, Hackfests, just check the Boulder Tech Events Calendar, there’s some tech even just about every day. And the big events like Ignite Boulder, TEDx, and of course Startup Week itself. In Boulder you will meet some of the smartest, most creative, most energized tech people in the world. Being in this environment, having those contact will make what you do that much better.

You can startup anywhere, but if you startup in Boulder you get more than just a location, you get a community.

I’m not sure which kind of cloudpocalypse to write about… the one that drops end-of-days tornadoes out of the sky or the one that brings web sites being hosted in Amazon’s EC2 cloud to their knees. The former might make for a good 2012 blog (and is tragic on a much more profound scale given the loss of life), but the latter is slightly more relevant to our colocation services.

There are many differing opinions on the implications of Amazon’s recent cloud outage. Some people think it was a necessary growing pain and will ultimately improve the reliability of the cloud. I don’t disagree. What most people agree on, including Amazon, is that your data should never ever ever be in just one place.

Enter Indra’s Net.

We have several customers who use our datacenter for their primary, secondary, or tertiary systems. Many of our customers are a quick drive or even bike ride away from getting their own hands on their own hardware and fixing any problems that may come up. Try that with the cloud. As many people recently learned the hard way, it’s a helpless feeling for your website or other IT systems to be down and have absolutely no control over fixing it. I’m not suggesting that we’re the cure for cloud woes or even the best and only place to colocate your servers. I am, however, suggesting that we’re absolutely worth considering as a piece of your IT plan.