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Photobucket fills in frame that Denver firm Data393 provides

Joyzelle Davis, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 19, 2006 at midnight

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Photobucket's 19 million users upload 45 images each second, and those photos and videos have to be stored somewhere.

The Denver-based company splits its co-location between two services, Data393 in the Denver Tech Center and Switch and Data's Denver facility. In both cases, the two companies provide power, cooling and security at their own facilities while Photobucket takes care of its own equipment and software as well as its own Internet connectivity.

Demand from companies such as Photobucket that are seeking to outsource or back up their information management systems has helped fuel a resurgence in recent years for the Internet data center industry, which imploded in 2000.

The crash was exactly when Lee Woodward decided to start -Data393, though it was less a deliberate plan than an attempt to make the best of a bad situation. He already owned the co-location facility, located at Interstate 25 and County Line Road, whose major tenants were British telecommunications company Cable & Wireless and -Colo.com. When both of those companies declared bankruptcy and left the building, all Woodward had left were the keys and about $30 million in telecom improvements that his tenants had made.

As other data centers across the country collapsed into financial ruin, Woodward became convinced that the market would rebound once the surplus capacity disappeared. And the 56-year-old was looking for another challenge. He had essentially retired after he and his wife, Percy, sold their computer servicing and reselling business in 1996.

"In my previous business, I'd always taken for granted the underlying infrastructure," said Woodward, who co-founded Data393 with Erik Porter. "And that's exactly what people like Photobucket want to do is take us for granted."

Both Data393 and Tampa, Fla.- based Switch and Data, which has 34 co-location facilities nationwide, are "carrier neutral" facilities. That means they provide access to multiple Internet providers. Data393, for instance, sits atop fiber from seven Internet companies including Qwest, Time Warner Telecom and Level 3.