Montreal Tech Watch

iWeb, whose facilities I visited 6 months ago, seems now to be unstopabble. They have opened earlier this year a new data center in St-Leonard, and last month, they have also acquired new office space in Sherbrooke street for additionnal office space. Now, they announced on their blog that they will open a third data center at Ile-des-Soeurs. This data center will be built exclusively for colocation services, i.e. for telecom companies with VOIP services or websites who have very high traffic which need multiple servers, without the hassle of building and owning their own data center. Previously, iWeb had a separate room for colocations, but the space was much smaller than the one for dedicated servers and boxes aimed at regular consumers.

iWeb will manage and guarantee security, N+1 redundant network and power supply. Customers will have full physical access over the servers, with iWeb employees having theorically no physical access to the servers.

iWeb is one of Canada’s biggest hosting providers, one of the very rare web hosting companies which own physically and manage their data centers. They host for instance Statistic Canada and Environment Canada’s website and services, banks, and a part of GE and Chrysler’s web infrastructure. They have also known double-digit growth yearly since 1999, mainly because of the cheap electricity that is supplied from Hydro, beating rates found in the US, Japan or Europe.