Colocation Hosting: Pros and Cons

Placing your own server equipment in someone else’s rack, instead of storing it at your business is called Colocation Hosting. This offsite rented data center colocation centers help small businesses to share the vast server sites of large corporations. This helps companies optimize each data center requirements that come along the way of building, maintaining and monitoring huge data centers.

Once an affordable colocation site is chosen, you can then get the bandwidth, IP and power to your servers from there. You can access your server like how you access a website on a hosting provider with the difference that you own the hardware here.

Pros of Colocation hosting

• Greater amount of bandwidth at considerably lower cost.
• Colocation hosting is flexible, efficient and secure than hosting your own server.
• Better 0utage protection- it might be difficult to tackle data center downtimes at your enterprise during long duration power loss. But a colocation provider will facilitate power generators and backup power to deal with such situations.
• Using and upgrading – You own the server machinery and are free to upgrade it anytime you wish, and use or install any software tools without relying on the provider.
• Perfect room temperatures for your servers.
• Use your service provider for additional services if you are short-staffed in your IT team, or during major upgrades or activities

Cons of Colocation hosting

• Colocation hosting needs higher start-up cost than if renting servers from hosting companies.
• Finding the right colocation provider in terms of proximity, pricing, and services
• Have to purchase equipment and updates on your own.
• Budgeting becomes confusing with fluctuating monthly rents due to bandwidth.
• Restrictions on maintenance with regards to time or resources

In the final analysis, every business needs to weigh these pros and cons based on their specific business needs, in-house resources, and financial considerations.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.