Colocation server hosting refers to the practice of renting out private servers and networking equipments in a datacenter belonging to a third party. This means that instead of maintaining servers in-house or in an office or a private datacenter, businesses can choose to keep their equipments by leasing out space through a colocation facility. Unlike other types of hosting, server colocation implies that rather than hiring server space from a hosting service provider, companies can own the server and rent the space needed to house that server inside a datacenter. The colocation server hosting provider will rent out space to businesses which can then install their equipments there; they will also supply the power and bandwidth, cooling systems and IP address etc. which are necessary for server deployment. This server space offered by the colocation hosting provider is called “cabinets” or “racks”. Depending on your budget and business needs, you can either partially or wholly rent cabinets and racks.
What are the advantages offered by colocation server hosting?
- To begin with, colocation ensures businesses can achieve economies of scale. This means that businesses do not pay for resources that they do not use. When businesses house their hardware in a third party datacenter, they can enjoy better access to higher bandwidth at far lower costs. This is why network latency is significantly low with colocation hosting and uptime is higher. The businesses enjoy more protection from power outages and there are multiple backups with an excellent team to assist them 24×7 for all kinds of technical problems.
- With colocation server hosting, businesses can enjoy higher security as compared to in-house hosting. For instance, CCTV cameras for constant monitoring or lockable cabinets may be hard to maintain within a private datacenter but these are used in colocation facilities. There are also effective fire detection and fire suppression mechanisms which guarantee complete data protection.
- Colocation also offers a great deal of flexibility; businesses can customize their plans and decide which parts of their systems they would want to give their attention to. Customers get to select the infrastructure that suits them best according to their budget. For instance, while a Tier 1 center is perfect for small businesses, a Tier 4 center is needed for the larger businesses having mission-critical data.
- With colocation hosting, businesses can enjoy the infrastructure of the datacenter belonging to a third party. They can enjoy control over the maintenance and configuration of their own servers. The whole process reduces costs and frees up precious space within offices. So, colocation helps to save resources which would have to be otherwise spent to handle logistics of maintaining in-house servers.
Business continuity is very crucial these days and downtime for applications like CRM or ERP will imply huge losses in business. So, more and more businesses are now trying to make their critical applications available at all times; for the small sized businesses this may amount to a huge investment which they may not be able to afford. This is where colocation server hosting can prove to be very beneficial. Companies can rent out just the amount of space and bandwidth they need to host a server in another party’s datacenter premises. They will then pay for this rack space, data-transfer and power to the colocation hosting provider on a quarterly or monthly basis.