A colocation centre or colocation center is a type of data centre where equipment space and bandwidth are available for rental to retail customers. Colocation facilities provide space, power, cooling, and physical security for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers with a minimum of cost and complexity.
Colocation has become a popular option for companies with mid-size IT needs especially those in Internet related business because it allows the company to focus its IT staff on the actual work being done, instead of the logistical support needs which underlie the work. Significant benefits of scale result in large colocation facilities, typically 4500 to 9500 square meters.
Colocation is a hosting option for small businesses who want the features of a large IT department without the costs. Many large corporations have the Internet infrastructure to host their own web servers and have a team of IT professionals to manage and design the site. There is a wide range of options available from simple hosting up to running your own Web servers off of a dedicated Internet connection. One such option is colocation.
COLOCATION allows you to place your server machine in someone else’s rack and share their bandwidth as your own. It generally costs more than standard Web hosting, but less than a comparable amount of bandwidth into your place of business. Once you have a machine set up, you take it physically to the location of the colocation provider and install it in their rack or you rent a server machine from the colocation provider. That company then provides an IP, bandwidth, and power to your server. Once it’s up and running, you access it much like you would access a Web site on a hosting provider. The difference being that you own the hardware.
Advantages of Colocation are higher bandwidth speeds and better redundancy for the network connections, better outage protection. We own the machinery and server software so we can upgrade the server and the software easily. If we move, we can leave the server up and running the entire time. Provide additional security for your machines.
Disadvantages of Colocation are upgrading and maintaining server is difficult, more expensive than basic Web hosting, physical access to your server can be difficult, fluctuating prices. If you move out of the area where your colocation provider is, you have to either move your servers to a new provider or leave them there and pay for a maintenance contract.
Colocation is required for small businesses that want to have a fairly large Web presence but don’t want to have to deal with a large amount items such as network connections.
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