Colocation Services in Business: What You Need to Know

Should you build and use your own server farm? This path currently costs about $10 Million per megawatt and about 18 months to complete.

Is transferring to 100% cloud-based housing a good idea? This newer approach is growing in popularity, but will your existing programs run on this new platform?

Is using colocation services the right move for your business?

These are all questions that face the modern business owner. Read on to learn what you need to know about colocation services to determine if this solution is right for your business. 

What is Colocation Services?

Colocation services (CoLo) include hosting, bandwidth providing, server cooling, climate control, and power to a location where servers are housed. You, own the hardware and are essentially renting space in a larger data center with other companies.

Benefits of Colocation

Colocation allows for scalability. You can purchase more hardware space or reduce hardware space as you need.

The cost of server cooling, the building, climate control, and power are shared among all of the companies in the colocation data center. Here is more information on colocation pricing.

The data center provides power redundancy, such as battery backups, secondary generators, etc.

Data centers have a larger bandwidth capacity than typically provided by a stand-alone internet connection.

Data centers provide on-site support. This includes on-site security, support technicians, and 24/7/365 monitoring of the vital systems.

Colocation provides focused support. You are an expert at your business, let an expert in data manage your servers. They focus full time on data server management so provide it at a high quality. 

Negatives of Colocation 

If you regularly make changes to your hardware, you will now have to travel or send someone to the data center to make those changes. This increases your costs for changes, updates, etc.

If you do your own hosting, your hosting costs change with changes in the internet, electricity, and building costs. In a colocation situation, your price is locked into the contracted price for the length of the contract. 

Colocation Hosting for Security

If you working in an industry like HealthCare, there are legal requirements for maintaining your hardware. This ensures that you do not violate things like HIPPA by unintentional sharing of personal information.

Colocation services provide for the highest level of security you require. In addition, because they focus on data managment they have the most modern security measures and are regularly updating them to match new threats.

Every decision you make in your business has pros and cons, deciding where to host your data center is no different.

Assess how much hardware you need, how much stuff you have, and what security you must provide in your data center. With that information, you can determine the right hosting solution for your business.

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