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Key Elements Of Colo Hosting In Bigger Cities
As IT solutions go, colo hosting can be pegged somewhere between in-house and dedicated host servers. With co-location, customers own the machine which is physically situated in a provider’s data center and connected to an internet backbone network. So there is no server rental, and only the rack space and bandwidth utilized has to be paid for.
If a customer does not have a machine, then the colocation provider will sell one to get things started. In this case, customers have to pay the initial purchase costs of the hardware required for the server. This co-location arrangement has many advantages compared to both in-house servers administered by customers themselves and dedicated (managed/unmanaged) rental servers provided by hosts.
The first and important aspect is flexible, on-demand bandwidth access as and when required. Most companies will not be able to afford a high-speed connection to an internet backbone with extreme bandwidth redundancy just for their own use. By using the provider’s data center instead, the customer is only charged for actual usage, which can vary widely both in the present and near-term future.
A second factor is that the monthly rental costs are lower than what dedicated server customers have to pay. A co-location customer pays for bandwidth used, and for the rack space. This space is measured in U (1.75 vertical inches) and one full rack adds up to about 40-42U.
Unlike a shift from in-house to hosted dedicated servers, customers can continue to invest in co-location hardware and software, and can plan for future growth. If business grows as expected because of the high-speed connection, the company now has many options open to it. They can upgrade and/or add more servers at the co-location center, or pull them all out and bring it back in-house because the increased traffic now makes it feasible.
Actually, keeping it in the co-location center is more cost efficient if a customer has multiple servers. Consider an example where a web host with a lot of servers packs everything up and sends it to a co-location center. The host now has no more overheads or server facility to worry about. With the focus entirely on customers who rent these servers, business grows faster, uptime is now 100%, and support is more effective.
Co-location is also helpful in case the company has to move. It doesn’t matter where the company is located, as long as the data center is operational and in the same place. Needless to say, any provider with a co-location center has to provide 100% uptime and high performance with access to multiple backbone networks, and ensure data security and safety of the machines.
Colocation hosting puts the reins firmly in the customer’s hands, with full control and access to the servers. Administration, software licensing, insurance and all such issues are still primarily the customer’s responsibility. But the bandwidth costs are now manageable while not hindering growth. The monthly rental rates are a lot lower than what dedicated server customers have to pay.
