There are plenty of servers in the Bay Area. There are several large colos in the South Bay (Equinix has several facilities in San Jose), San Francisco has a large colo at 200 Paul Ave, there's a bunch of stuff in the East Bay as well. Amazon has a nothern california region, not sure exactly where those servers are, etc.
Sure, I have equipment in several of those, but it isn't a sole hosting location for most large tech companies. Really big companies tend to be multi site. Smaller ones use cheaper clouds or managed hosting generally outside the area. A lot of the bay area gear is enterprise for local companies which would already be screwed by an earthquake, or network, etc to support people who live in the Bay Area.
SFBA is critical for personnel, not so much manufacturing or hosting.
There is about 3mm square feet of datacenter space here. There are very few large companies which have servers only here and not somewhere outside the area but which would be reasonably expected to continue operating if their servers were somehow unaffected.
Okay, but you started by saying "no one really has datacenters in the Bay Area anymore", and now you're talking about sole hosting, which is a completely different assertion.
True. (You may also note the time of my initial post; I was still awake at 0320, and this was shortly after the quake...); I wasn't being particularly precise.
However, SFBA isn't even the first location for most companies I see. They go either into the cheaper AWS cloud regions (us east or the Oregon), or managed hosting somewhere (rarely SFBA).
Bay Area companies which directly get colo early on are fairly rare: stripe, square, etc. I fully support it as a strategy, but it is statistically insignificant.
Aside from price, east coast single location also gives you a lot better latency to Europe. Asia is usually screwed anyway, but the extra 80ms makes a big difference.
