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Pretty much what Spudstr said. Anyone is free to contact me for trials/test downloads and the such. I'll put our network in direct tests with anyone's out there. Our datacenter facilities are located within Equinix and Qwest in 350 East Cermak in Chicago. Out of these locations we have roughly a 500 cabinet footprint.
As for profitability. Yes, $5/Mbit sold in this specific manner is profitable, and is for the long-haul (and will be more so as time goes on). I do find it slightly humorous in some of the posts made on GFY lately with hosts publicly stating such pricing is unsustainable - and then they undercut my bids by a considerable margin (where I simply bow out since it's too cheap) in private in a bid to either keep a current customer, or take one from us. I try to keep what we sell out in the open - why not if it's profitable? We can only sell more by doing so!
I will say, as Brad has stated in the past, that a flat-rate $4-5/Mbit all you can eat with multiple servers/etc. type of plan is not currently sustainable if that is your entire book of business. At least for us. However, in the specific "media server" roles that we've been selling such deals lately, it is certainly very profitable business we enjoy picking up.
Other hosts are also right in that you cannot buy 20gigs of transit at $3/mbit and then resell it for $4/mbit and expect to profit. That's just irresponsible.
We also have scale on our side. Our edge (e.g. traffic to the Internet) now peaks at more than 550Gbps these days.
Also.. anyone that pipes up stating that peering is "free" - please educate yourself prior to posting.
So, flame away! That's probably the most controversial post you'll ever see me make in some time.
-Phil
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