Colocation Services

As an online business, you no doubt have begun receiving all sorts of propositions. Today I learned a new term: colocation. It deals with web hosting but is not cloud storage, which is, as we  recently wrote, storing/backing-up your files on a services web servers.  While managed web hosting means you are leasing offsite web servers from a data center, colocation is the term used to describe when a web-based business owns their own servers but wants to house them off-site in an enterprise-class facility.

Why would a business want to do that? To free themselves from liability.  What if your building was broken into, lost power or heaven forbid, had a fire? You might lose everything.  With colocation, your own dedicated servers are taken and stored in a secure, fire protected data center, one with high-performance bandwidth, all the redundant power backups you can think of  for outage protection (many guarantee 10o% uptimes) and with adequate space and temperature controls. But there is also the cost-savings benefit. Since your servers are managed off-site by someone else, you don’t need your own dedicated IT department. In addition, you can upgrade or downgrade your hardware needs as your needs change, all from a shared and rented space.

All this means colocation is footsep in the right direction for your business – a very valuable business proposition indeed.