In hosting industry, the term Colocation is widely used and accepted to mean the practice of housing your servers and devices in a professional datacenter in order to access economies of scale, advanced infrastructure, greater bandwidth, lower latency, specialist services and systems, constant security and a whole host of additional advantages.
What that means is that the client seeking colocation services would ideally have their own servers but simply seek a professional data centre where to house their server and use ther data centre utilities. The hosting client is normally responsible for the mantainance of their servers or will have to pay a cost to have the data centre do that for them.
As technologies become more extensive and sophisticated, the option of constructing or adding on to a proprietary, private datacenter becomes commercially and practically absurd (except, perhaps, for the largest businesses).
Greater resilience to disaster and to malicious attack, huge savings available in cost and time and the sheer convenience of an environment in which every conceivable service is immediately on hand are some of the reasons hosts with their own equipment may opt to seek colocation rather than host them in their homes or offices.
Colocation services are offered by datacenters equipped and configured to allow secure client access to private servers. Colocation services include leasing server cabinets and cages, connecting to the ISP's network and physical infrastructure, and monitoring server status. Each cabinet and cage is securely locked and inaccessible to other colocation clients. Hardware is administered by the client without any ISP involvement, except manual server restarts upon request. Some ISPs offer additional professional services as well.
Colocation services let clients take advantage of superior datacenter infrastructure, while maintaining control over their servers. The benefits to colocation customers include:
- Environmental control, such as constant temperature and humidity maintenance, and particulates filtration
- Fire suppression systems
- Redundant power sources and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) backup
- Large capacity of multi-homed quality bandwidth
- Around-the-clock physical security such as card entry and video monitoring of the facilities
- Monitoring and technical services such as central data storage, backups, firewall and DDoS attack mitigation.
Using colocation services is an effective way to obtain business continuity, scalability and minimal network latency at a fraction of the cost it takes to accomplish the same things in a private datacenter. Yet at the same time you can maintain complete control over the physical server, the operating system and the applications.
