A colocation is a hosting option that allows enterprises to house their servers in a third-party's rack and share their bandwidth. The service provider, usually called the host, takes the onus of power supply, cooling system, and other necessary services for the uninterrupted running of clients' servers.
Normally suitable for small businesses, a server colocation hosting is little expensive than a normal hosting. But it fulfills the needs of businesses to have the features of a large IT infrastructure without investing too much. Most large enterprises have their own Internet infrastructure for hosting their own web servers, and a dedicated IT team to oversee the servers, but a small business cannot afford to have the facility of its own. Colocation comes to their rescue.
More and more such enterprises moving towards this cost-effective way of hosting. Now they are realizing the actual benefits of a server colocation hosting over running their own server room. They understand how this option can save them money while having greater resilience in a data center.
The Compelling Benefits of Colocation Hosting
The Cost of Bandwidth: The biggest advantage of server colocation hosting is the cost for bandwidth. Normally a low-cost limited bandwidth enterprise-level DSL line costs you as much amount that would have required for housing a single server in a colocation facility that provides premium bandwidth speeds and better redundancy for the Internet connectivity.
Better Outage Protection: A colocation facility has better systems placed to tackle outages. Being a small or medium sized enterprise, you may not have enough budget for adequate power-backup. Any outage will result into website down causing huge business loss. But in colocation facility the case is entirely different. Since they house a number of servers, they adopt several power backup options to protect against outages.
Flexibility to Install Software/Tools: You are the sole owner of your server. You can install any software or tools that you want to use. You won't be dependent on your hosting service provider for all these.
Flexibility to Upgrade Server: If you find that your server is lagging, you can upgrade it at your own without relying on the service provider.
Enhanced Security: A colocation facility center embraces several layers of security to provide your server an enhanced security. You are assured that your server machine is housed and maintained in more secured environment.
Managed Service: With a colocation facility, you will have complete peace-of-mind as the service provider can provide a managed service under which their IT professional will oversee maintenance of your server by paying an extra amount. The managed service is useful for those enterprises who have no in-house IT team members.
The bottom line
Be very careful while choosing a server colocation hosting center because your collocated equipment are mission-critical.
