DreamHost Anchor Tenant in ViaWest's Oregon Data Center

ViaWest has signed cloud and web hosting provider DreamHost as the anchor tenant in its new Oregon data center. ViaWest opened the 140,000 square foot data center earlier this month.

Securing an anchor tenant is a crucial step for any new data center build, marking the turning point when the investment starts to generate income. Companies often hold off on building a facility until they secure an anchor tenant, but so-called "speculative" builds are also common.

Los Angeles-based DreamHost is shifting its data center strategy from operating data centers on its own to colocation services. It is consolidating two of its data centers in California into the ViaWest facility, outsourcing data center management to the provider to reduce overhead.

“We wanted to focus our internal resources on developing products instead of maintaining our data centers,” said Patrick Lane, VP of data center operations at DreamHost, in a statement. The company believes it will be able to achieve significant cost savings in the move.

DreamHost has over 400,000 customers and hosts 1.5 million websites and 750,000 Wordpress installations. It’s also big on OpenStack, having birthed several interesting open source projects. Ceph software defined storage and the Red Hat-owned InkTank spun off from DreamHost, as did Akanda, a network virtualization solution for OpenStack.

ViaWest continues to expand under its parent Shaw Communications, the Canadian telco that acquired it for $1.2 billion last year as a keystone of the growth strategy for its data center business.

The Hillsboro area in Oregon, where ViaWest's new Brookwood data center is located, is known as Silicon Forest due to a high concentration of technology companies and lots of data centers.

DreamHost is also the anchor tenant in RagingWire’s first data center in Ashburn, Virginia.