Why should your business use co-location hosting?
Co-location hosting is pretty popular all over the world, and thousands of businesses use it every single day for their needs. It basically is the same thing as a dedicated server or a cloud, except that you provide your own equipment and pay only for the space, energy and bandwidth that.
There are a lot of advantages of co-location hosting over a cluster or a single dedicated server. Most of the times, businesses that get a co-location package from a hosting provider with their own data center just want to have more control over their servers and data and save money and time, which would’ve otherwise been spent on paying for a high speed Internet connection to their office building and getting all of the equipment necessary to maintain the servers in proper working condition. Below is a list of the most important advantages of co-location hosting over other solutions.
Improved security. By having your equipment inside a proper data center, you can be sure that it will be very secure. Most data centers have only one entrance, with special doors that do not allow you to enter without a special pass and a security guard near you. Your servers and data are protected from burglars, fires, and other things that can compromise the security of your information.
Improved reliability. This one goes hand in hand with the above point. A data center has all the things it needs to make the operation of a server as safe and reliable as possible. They have multiple power sources and cable connections to the Internet, so if one goes down, the other takes over and nothing is interrupted. The server rooms are also clean, dustless and very well cooled, which means most equipment can last for decades and still look like new.
Less maintenance.You’ll only need to maintain your own hardware (and you can always let the data center do it for you) and software, nothing else. If you had all of the servers inside your office building, rest assured you would’ve had to deal with much more than just the computers. Power supplies, routers, switches, cables and anything else that supports the servers need constant maintenance, which most small businesses (and even some large ones) simply can’t afford.
Better connectivity.This is probably the best reason for choosing co-location hosting. Most established datacenters already have a good connection to major worldwide cables that connect all of the countries on Earth to the Internet. Many of them have multiple backbones, too, which means if one is overloaded or offline, others can take over, with no connection loss, ever. You can’t possibly achieve something like this in your own building! Even if you accept the very high costs of getting such a connection to your doorstep, your sites and applications will definitely be slower in some parts of the world and faster in others, due to you having only one backbone provider.
More control and privacy.By having your own equipment and renting only the space and bandwidth, you have more control over your hardware thanwhen renting a cluster or a dedicated server. In most cases, you’re not subject to the datacenter’s general Terms of Service (unless you do something illegal, of course), and they don’t have the permission nor desire to look what’s on your machines. If they get a DMCA request of other similar notes, they let you deal with it. You’re basically guaranteed the highest privacy possible for a hosting package.
There are other reasons for choosing co-location hosting for a business, but the above are the most important. If you value time and money, but still want to get the same privacy and control over yourdata that you’d get from having your servers in your own office, then co-location hosting is a solution worthy of investigating.
