When you are deciding on a host for your website, there’s one option that might not have occurred to you: colocation.
What this refers to is a situation where a business wants to retain complete control of the servers for its website, but this control extends beyond simply having a dedicated server run by a web hosting company. Instead of using a web host, the business owns and operates its own servers.
What Is Colocation Hosting?
You may wonder what’s unusual about that.
Surely there are businesses that serve as their own website hosts, with their own servers?
Colocation is something like that, but adds the factor that the business doesn’t necessarily keep these servers in its own building, for various reasons.In other words it is Co Located Sever Hosting.
These might involve security, high costs, or other factors. Or perhaps the business is completely web-based, and has no building at all.
What, then, do such businesses do, if they want to bypass a web host?
They rent space at a large data center, installing their servers there, paying for the Internet connection, space, bandwidth, and power, and managing their own hardware. Sometimes the data center will also provide server management if the clients want to pay for that as well.
But why exactly would a business want to keep their servers in such a data center?
There are many possible reasons. These centers offer significant “benefits of scale,” that is, they offer large amounts of power, space, and data infrastructure that many companies can access for a much lower price than if they tried to develop corresponding resources by themselves. A colocation center is a sort of pooling of resources. The data infrastructure, especially, allows greater bandwidth capacity, meaning a company’s website should operate more smoothly and efficiently.
After disasters like the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks or Hurricane Katrina in the U.SA. Or for most small businesses in Australia and especially in Northern Queensland where cyclones or floods can destroy buildings, many companies have realized that they need backup systems even if they retain their IT and communication facilities in their own buildings.
Complete Hosting Protection
Colocation centers offer backup generators (often, in fact, several layers of backup power systems) in the case of power failures. In fact, many of these centers connect to the power grid at several different locations, to try to provide reliable power in the event one location goes down.
They also supply many layers of fire prevention and protection systems, with air conditioning and humidity controls for optimal operation of the equipment. They are usually highly secure, physically, and may have guards and closed circuit television surveillance.
The costs of placing company servers in a colocation center are usually quite high, so this kind of service isn’t always employed by smaller businesses. The main clients are often telecommunications companies and other large firms that need to guarantee continuity of their services even during power failures or catastrophes.
Yet every business needs reliable daily backups of its systems, and needs to be concerned about their security. It’s possible that even mid-sized companies, as they analyze what they are already paying for with additional security measures and redundant systems and backups, would be able to justify the costs of setting up servers at a colocation center.
This is not a hosting service that we currently offer any of our clients, however we have used this when working for a previous company where they had three colocation centres in Malaysia, Brisbane, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand. If any of these colocation centres experienced any problems there would be an immediate transfer to the next system ensuring the sites we were managing stayed online at all times.
