Colocation Pros
1. You Control The Hardware Choices
Since you can build your servers exactly the way that you want, you’re able to tailor the setup to perfectly suit your workload. That can mean buying the very latest CPUs and disks or matching a low-end CPU with a huge amount of RAM. Either way, you can build to the exact specifications you need to meet your price/performance goals.
And if you already using servers on site, colocating them is simply a matter of installing them into a rack at the data center.
2. You Pick The Data Center Location
Each data center location charges prices that reflect their cost to supply power and run your servers, and those prices vary based on geographical region. Additionally, the network latency to reach those locations from your office is affected by distance. By carefully selecting your colocation facility, you can balance the hosting costs with the network latency incurred to reach the data center.
3. Private Connection To The Colo Facility
You can get all the advantages of colocation with the privacy and speed of on-premise hosting by establishing a dedicated line between your offices and the colocation facility. This allows you to use your servers as though they were physically located on site when they’re actually stored in a data center with improved security, power redundancy, and environmental control.
4. Environmental Control
When running your own servers, accurately monitoring and controlling their temperature is critical for avoiding overheating and component failure. Colocation facilities offer industrial-grade cooling equipment to ensure your servers always run at a specified temperature.
Colocation Con
You Are Responsible For Everything
From purchasing the server to installing the software and configuring it, you have the responsibility for setting up your server and keeping it running. And that includes shipping your server to the data center.
Because you own the hardware, when something goes wrong it’s up to you to identify and diagnose the issue, which sometimes means travelling to the data center, for example, when you’re unable to use the remote console to troubleshoot the problem. While many data centers offer managed services (sometimes called remote hands) where they will take care of installing and managing your servers for an additional fee, there are limits to the work they will do.
Ultimately, when you use colocation the buck stops with you.