If you had to make a list of technologies that are most important to the average person's day-to-day life, data centers would sit near the top of that list, and yet chances are you know very little about them. There are a few reasons for this. For one, they're not sexy in the way that an iPhone or a cutting-edge drone is sexy. But also the people and companies who run data centers are fairly secretive, mostly to protect their machines from any sort of attack.

This combination of secrecy and obscurity has made Rich Miller's expertise very lucrative. He's spent the last two decades covering data center tech for various news outlets he's owned. His current site, Data Center Frontier, is a must-read for anyone working in the $60 billion+ industry.

I interviewed Rich about how he accidentally fell into the beat, why he sold his first data center site, and what made him want to start a brand new one from scratch.