All of us have heard enough of web hosting. Good resources exist on Business2Community.com such as:
- Small Business Web Hosting: Where You’re Hosted Matters
- Web Hosting 101: A Guide to Small Business Web Hosting
- Seven of the Silliest Web Hosting Features
- Which Web Hosting Plan Would You Choose for Your Company
You can also check out this Infographic created by Nerdster. The Infographic will clear basic web hosting related concepts.
This post is about a particular aspect: colocated web hosting, and how it will benefit your business websites and blogs in a better fashion.
What is Colocation?
Colocation is an ‘extension’ of dedicated web hosting system where you hire and house servers in a professional data center to access advanced IT infrastructure, lower latency, greater net bandwidth, economies of scale, security and other specialist services. Unless you have a sprawling business, adding proprietary data centers is commercially unviable.
Colocation web service emerges as a better strategy for various businesses because of its greater resilience to malicious attacks, convenience and cost effectiveness. To give you an idea of colocation data centers features, there’s Hostoople, whose Dallas-based data centers are offer services like 100 Mbps 4TB bandwidth, 2U Cabinet space, 6 IP’s and more. There’s Coreix who data centers are spread over China, India, Russia, Spain, Turkey and UAE and comes in affordable options. Similarly, there are many other colocation service providers spread all over the world.
Colocation Services: What they are?
Colocation services allow a business private access to a certain number of web servers. These services include connection of dedicated ISP network, leasing of cages and cabinets, monitoring servers, physical infrastructure and more. The cabinets are securely located and inaccessible to other colocation clients. You get access to superior data center infrastructure.
As a colocation customer, you get access to fire suppression systems, UPS backup, redundant power sources, environmental control, multi-homed quality bandwidth capacity, physical security, technical services and monitoring.
Upgrading your business to colocation network is an effective way to enhance business scalability and continuity with minimum cost.
Choosing the Right Colocation Service Provider
It’s a big decision.
The colocation provider will house mission-critical infrastructure and you can’t go wrong with it. If you do, it will be a huge business loss.
Therefore, keep a note of these points.
1) Reliability
This is essential; it means the data center should have a 99.999% uptime. For instance, CoreSite has a performance of 99.9999% uptime time and 100% SLA. You should also look for customer feedback, staff certifications and on-site support to measure its reliability.
2) Scalability
The colocation services should be scalable, as in your business needs should be met now and the next couple of years down the line. Different data centers will have varied levels of flexibility and scalability. Some will offer customized solutions, other will offer fixed plans. Keep a note of connectivity, power and space availability issues.
Do not select any colocation provider which can’t scale up as your business grows.
3) Location Point
The location of data centers determines how your business will be well managed. You have to consider how soon members of the staff can reach the data center to get upgrades or service any equipment.
Also, you have to consider how prone the location of data center is to natural disasters like tornadoes, earthquakes, floods and hurricanes. Usually, data center creators look into these factors before developing the facility but still, from your side, you should make additional queries.
4) Deployment
How soon can the data center deploy its services? How soon can the business be up and running? The colocation service provider should be fast to deploy its services and additional services like additional rack spaces or new cross connects. You can’t quantify deployment in numbers; therefore, ensure that when you talk to the colocation provider, timelines are clearly communicated.
5) Lemming Effect
Lemming Effect is a psychological phenomena stating that people adapt and follow each other, giving rise to a community mentality.
When you want a better idea of how the data center location is, look into how many colocation service providers are located within the same area. If they are a lot of them, it means the area has good network connectivity, reliability utility services (water and power) and a geographically hospitable environment.
6) Financial Stability
You don’t want to sign up with a colocation service provider that closes business in a couple of years. Since you’re investing a lot of money, you have to ensure that the chosen data center supports you for a minimum of 5 years at least. Therefore, look into the financial history, current financial reporting and press releases to understand the viability of the company.
Conclusion
Hiring the services of a colocated infrastructure provider will help to scale up your business to a higher level. If not colocation, you can also seek dedicated web hosting.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Colocated Web Hosting: Scale Up Your Business to a Co-Located Host
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