If you have a business website that you host on your company network infrastructure, you know how much effort it takes to maintain it. Having your own hardware gives you a lot of control, but it also incurs a lot of cost. What if you could have your own hardware and host it in a data center that will handle all the ops for you? This is essentially what colocation hosting gives you.
What is colocation?
It is the practice of buying your server and installing and hosting it in a professional data center. It relieves you from a lot of responsibilities, while letting you retain full control over your server hardware and software. There are certain data centers that are specifically geared towards hosting third party hardware.
They take care of operational aspects like:
- Network and bandwidth management
- Server hardware management
- Power delivery
- Security
- Cooling and other means of temperature control
The cost of hosting all of this for a small to medium sized business is enormous. Companies did bear all these costs in the beginning of 2000’s, but many are now turning towards colocation services offered by reliable service providers like the 7L Networks Inc.
Benefits of colocation
Colocation is beneficial for your business in many ways other than just taking out a burden off your shoulder.
- Since your servers are located along with many others, you can achieve economies of scale
- You can get greater bandwidth for lower costs as your provider uses dynamic allocation
- Since bandwidth is managed by specialists, your website experiences much lower latencies and fast loading and operational speeds
- You can save a lot of time by letting the colocation provider handle server repairs and maintenance
Overall, colocating your servers not only gives you more cost savings, it also gives you a more efficient server. You do not need to own a space that will host your servers and pay for its maintenance. You get to host your server using advanced infrastructure provided by the colocation hosting company.
Security and reliability
The most important aspect of colocation hosting is that your servers are much safer and more secure in dedicated data centers. This is because colocation services have:
- Multiple redundant sources of power supply and uninterruptible power supplies
- Fire suppression mechanisms that will prevent and minimize damages due to fire
- Flood protection mechanisms that will keep your server safe during heavy rains and storms
- High quality bandwidth that you can trust more than your own
- Physical security with advanced measured including surveillance and monitoring
- Climate control including temperature stability and humidity regulator
If you are unsure about your business continuity plans, colocation hosting is a good place to start. These data centers have service level agreements in place that will cover you well in case of physical damage or loss of data and configuration. If you are a large business with unlimited resources to dedicate to server management, colocation hosting is a very attractive proposition that many companies are turning to.
