What the Facility Delivers
Hostway, the Illinois-based web hosting and managed services provider founded in 1998, has opened its third data center in Austin, Texas. The company serves roughly 600,000 customers and counts Microsoft and Magento among its enterprise partners — a clientele whose uptime expectations shape every design decision at a facility like this.
Austin III is Hostway's most capable site to date, and its infrastructure reflects the standard playbook for a serious, multi-tenant colocation build: eliminate single points of failure, then eliminate them again.
Power is the first discipline. The facility runs multiple underground feed routes — geographic diversity in the conduit trenches means a single backhoe strike or utility fault doesn't darken the campus — and backs those feeds with on-site generation. Generating your own power at the facility level is the practical definition of utility independence: the grid becomes a preference, not a lifeline. Underground fiber routes mirror the same logic on the connectivity side, ensuring that physical diversity extends from electrons to photons.
Network throughput tops out at 100 Gb/s routing capability. For context, that's the bandwidth tier where enterprise workloads — high-volume transactional databases, media delivery, managed cloud services — stop bumping against the ceiling. It's not a hyperscale AI training cluster, but it's the connectivity grade that serious enterprise SLAs demand.
Cooling and generator systems are described as enterprise-grade, which at minimum implies redundant cooling paths and generators sized to carry full IT load — the infrastructure decisions that separate a Tier III-class facility from a well-appointed server closet.
The Security Stack
Physical security at Austin III is layered across five distinct barrier points, a hardware perimeter architecture designed so that defeating one control doesn't hand an attacker the next. That kind of defense-in-depth is standard practice in facilities handling customer data at scale.
Access control combines biometrics with two-factor authentication — two independent credential types before a door opens, which closes off the most common physical intrusion vectors. The facility is staffed around the clock, every day of the year, by on-site security personnel. Automated systems catch anomalies; human judgment handles what automation misses.
The Austin build adds a third facility to Hostway's local footprint, deepening redundancy options for Texas-based customers who want geographic diversity within a single metro — a smaller-scale version of the same logic that drives hyperscalers to build campus clusters rather than isolated buildings. For an operator at Hostway's scale, the third site in a single market is a statement about commitment to that market as much as it is a technical decision.
Read as a general lesson, not a promotion: the spec sheet of one ordinary enterprise facility shows what every serious buildout has to deliver before a single server powers on.
