A breakdown of why I chose 123Net DC1 in Southfield, Michigan: the facility, the network, the Detroit Internet Exchange, and what it actually means for VPS latency.
RackWorks is a solo-operated KVM and LXC VPS platform. Solo-operated, no team. Our hardware is colocated at 123Net DC1 in Southfield, Michigan, and provides virtual machines and containers to customers who need low-latency, reliable hosting in the Midwest and Great Lakes region.
This post covers why I picked that facility, what the network looks like, and what the real-world numbers mean for customers.
The Facility: 123Net DC1, Southfield MI
123Net DC1 is an 80,000 square foot data center with 20 megawatts of available utility power. Tier IV means fully fault-tolerant with no single point of failure for power or cooling. The facility holds SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS certifications. The building is reinforced concrete, not in a flood plain, and has five entrance vaults for physical security and redundant fiber entry.
Those specs matter for one reason: uptime. A Tier IV facility with 20+ carriers on-site and redundant everything is the kind of place where planned maintenance does not require downtime. I did not want to colocate in a building where a single UPS failure or one fiber cut takes everything offline.
There is also a practical reason for the Detroit metro specifically. 123Net owns and operates its own statewide fiber network. That means I am not dependent on a third-party carrier for connectivity within the building. The upstreams I use transit through their own infrastructure before hitting external peers.
The Detroit Internet Exchange (DET-iX)
The most important thing about 123Net DC1 is what lives inside it: the Detroit Internet Exchange, also known as DET-iX. It is one of the largest fee-free internet exchanges in the world, operating at 2.5 terabits per second of peak traffic across more than 370 BGP sessions.
The member list includes Apple, Microsoft, Google, and 90+ other peers. When traffic from my VMs needs to reach a Google server or an Akamai CDN node, that traffic stays inside the building and crosses the exchange fabric directly, skipping transit hops and carrier fees entirely.
That is what a colocation customer actually buys when they pick a well-peered facility. It is not just rack space. It is proximity to the exchange.
Latency: Real Numbers from the Looking Glass
I run a looking glass at rackworks.net/lookingglass.php so customers can check latency before buying. The numbers below are from actual ICMP probes, not marketing estimates.
| Destination | Round-Trip Time |
|---|---|
| Chicago, IL | 10 ms |
| New York, NY | 16 ms |
| Toronto, Canada | 22 ms |
| Dallas, TX | 28 ms |
| Seattle, WA | 32 ms |
| Miami, FL | 43 ms |
| Los Angeles, CA | 47 ms |
| Amsterdam, NL | 97 ms |
| Tokyo, Japan | 146 ms |
Chicago at 10ms is as good as it gets for a Detroit-area host. The Midwest and Great Lakes region, including Toronto, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis, is all sub-30ms. East Coast is under 20ms. The intercontinental numbers are what physics allows; there is no optimizing past the speed of light.
If your use case is algorithmic trading against Chicago or New York exchanges, latency-sensitive gaming for a Midwest player base, or a VPN exit node for US traffic, those numbers are competitive with anything hosted in the region.
The Hardware
Our servers run Dell PowerEdge hardware. Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs, 20 cores each, hyperthreaded, giving 80 threads total. Storage pools are split between NVMe for the KVM and LXC SSD plans and SATA SSD for the budget tiers.
These are purpose-built 1U rack servers with no consumer compromises. ECC RAM, redundant PSUs, iDRAC for out-of-band management. If a DIMM fails at 3am, I get an alert and can replace it without touching the VMs.
What This Means for Customers
The short version: you get enterprise-grade colocation infrastructure and serious network connectivity without the enterprise price tag.
Most budget VPS providers use mid-tier facilities with limited peering. They oversell CPU and RAM to hit a price point. Traffic goes through one or two upstream carriers with no exchange presence, which means extra hops and worse latency to major networks.
Hosting on RackWorks means your VM is physically inside the same building as DET-iX, one of the largest internet exchanges in North America. Your traffic to Google, Microsoft, Apple, and 90+ other peers crosses a local fabric. Your latency to Chicago is 10ms, not 30ms.
When something goes wrong, I fix it. There is no ticket queue, no Tier 1 support reading from a script. That is the trade-off of a solo-operated platform: smaller scale, but actual accountability.
If that sounds like what you need, the KVM VPS plans and LXC container plans are on the main site.