Monday 23 January 2012

Main Features Of Collocation Hosting In Bigger Cities

By Briana Jake Woodward


UK colo hosting as an IT solution lies midway between an in-house setup and an unmanaged dedicated server. The customer simply sends the machine to the co-location center where it gets rack space in the host's data center and is plugged into the internet backbone network. The customer thus pays only for use of the space and bandwidth, and not for the server itself.

Some customers may not have a machine to begin with, in which case the colocation hosting provider can also sell a full server. This can add a hefty amount to the initial setup costs for co-location. Either way, there are unique advantages to co-location which make it better than any other solution.

The primary factor in favor of co-location is the uncertainty regarding the bandwidth needs of a company, now or in future. The co-location data center has a lot of built-in redundancy that customers can tap as and when required. This is a slam dunk winner compared to the huge costs of creating this same redundant capacity in-house or even worse, living without it.

A second factor is that the monthly rental costs are lower than what dedicated server customers have to pay. A co-location customer pays for bandwidth used, and for the rack space. This space is measured in U (1.75 vertical inches) and one full rack adds up to about 40-42U.

The company can invest in the hardware, software and server administration costs, with an eye on further expansion after realization of forecasted growth. If the traffic grows and the servers are being heavily used, the company has kept its options open. They can now bring the servers back in-house or upgrade the servers at the co-location center and add new ones.

Actually, keeping it in the co-location center is more cost efficient if a customer has multiple servers. Consider an example where a web host with a lot of servers packs everything up and sends it to a co-location center. The host now has no more overheads or server facility to worry about. With the focus entirely on customers who rent these servers, business grows faster, uptime is now 100%, and support is more effective.

Co-location also makes it easy in case the company has to physically move from one place to another. The data center remains operational and there is no disruption. Of course, this is true based on the assumption that the co-location provider is reliable and provides 100% uptime with guaranteed performance and security for data and hardware.

Colocation hosting puts the reins firmly in the customer's hands, with full control and access to the servers. Administration, software licensing, insurance and all such issues are still primarily the customer's responsibility. But the bandwidth costs are now manageable while not hindering growth. The monthly rental rates are a lot lower than what dedicated server customers have to pay.




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