Colocation Hosting
Colocation offers a variety of benefits to small and medium sized businesses. While some hosting services have recently downsized their colocation programs and instead pushed for businesses to simply use dedicated servers, colocation will always be an option.
Colocation is generally only a good option for businesses that lack either the financial resources, physical space, or both, to house and maintain their servers.
Colocation originally became popular because businesses didn’t want to spend the money to created their own data center. Aside from the cost and convenience, there are several big advantages that can be gained from colocation hosting.
Power Supply
A quality colocation service will have multiple or redundant power supplies, which are extremely expensive to recreate in-house by small businesses.
A quality hosting company should have a state of the art data center. This will include complete surge and lightning protection, multiple battery backups, and generators that can compensate for an extended power outage.
Hardware Protection
Colocation hosting facilities have the ability to protect your servers, thus your sensitive data, throughout a wide range of conditions. The best colocation facilities are built to withstand all sorts of hazards such as fire, flooding, high humidity, air pollution, earthquakes, and hurricanes.
This protection comes with a high price tag, but that is the benefit of this type of hosting. The costs are shared by multiple businesses all using the same facilities and it is much cheaper than building this type of facility in-house.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth can become very expensive, very quickly. Most of the time, businesses only use a small amount of their total available bandwidth because they must pay for enough bandwidth to handle traffic spikes. When you lease bandwidth from a colocation hosting provider instead of paying for bandwidth for your in-house data center, you will only be paying for the amount you use.
Physical Security
Regardless of the physical security that your business has, there is always a chance that it will get broken into. It could be someone attacking your business, or just a disgruntled employee. All they need to do is get to your data center and copy the information they want to a disk.
Hosting facilities ensure the physical security of your servers, because security is part of their business.
While the potential drawbacks prevent large companies from using colocation hosting services, many small and medium businesses can benefit from using a colocation hosting service.
