Locations of Facebook Data centers

Do you guys know the locations of Facebook data centers? Well, even if you don't know we are anyways going to reveal it in this blog. In early days, Facebook used other's data centers to host its website as it didn't have much user base. But as they grew bigger and bigger in global scale, they realized the need for their own data center. Then came the phase, they used mixed of both. Also, they had been using content delivery network (CDN) of Akamai. But again the company and userbase grew so big that they could afford to build their own data centers around the world in different locations and have their own CDN network as well. 

 

So, as of today there are 17 data centers of Facebook. Few of them can be under construction which I am not sure about. Considering both in-operation and underconstruction data centers of Facebook, they are located in following places:

1. Denmark (1): Odense
   
2. Ireland (1): Clonee
   
3. Singapore (1)
   
4. Sweden (1): Luleå
   
5. United States (13): Altoona, Dekalb, Eagle Mountain, Forest City, Fort Worth, Gallatin, Henrico, Huntsville, Los Luna, New Albany, Newton, Papillion and Prineville
   

However, they are still limited to only 5 countries despite being one of the most used website in the world. This probably has to with the fact that Facebook is not into cloud services like Google or Amazon. Google and Amazon while having their own website user base, they also sell cloud web services in addition to that. That is why they have more requirements of data centers. But Facebook is using its data centers for the sole purpose of its own web applications including Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. Also, it is quite interesting to see that Facebook has concentrated most of its facilities in US.

Hope you liked our blog post on Facebook data centers and their locations. We will update you with more interesting facts in the future if we discover any. So, stay tuned.

Story behind Facebook and its data center

Since this is the beginning of our blog posts, we will narrate story behind Facebook and its data centers. However, we will not go into much details regarding Facebook data center locations, which we will spare for next blog. We hope you will find this story quite amusing.

 

Facebook was found in early 2004 during the Harvard days of Mark Zuckerberg, the main man behind this project. However, there had been other founders along with him, who too contributed to the creation of this project called "The Facebook" which was later changed into facebook. However, there remains a lot of controversies regarding the founding of the company. The seniors from Mark Zuckerberg's college claimed that Mark has actually stole the idea from them. And in the court of law, seniors did get some percentage of shares for the settlement of the case. Which means, there has been some truth to the controversy or claim.

What actually happened is seniors were working on project similar and had hired a developer. Later, when the developer left the project halfway, they hired Mark for the completion of project. But Mark kept postponing the finishing of work, making one excuse or other and instead launched his own project with his friends, similar to the project he was assigned by his seniors. This is what created controversy and legal battle. 

But whatever may be the history, it has now left far behind and what we have now is a website with over a billion of active users worldwide. The company initially purchased space from popular hosting companies like Equinix. However, now due to growing demand and data usage in their platform, they have build their own data centers to gain more control over it and also to reduce the cost. It is said that they have currently 17 data centers of their own in the world, which will be further discussed in the next blog in more details.